English
Related papers

Related papers: Provably Learning Attention with Queries

200 papers

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

When and how can an attention mechanism learn to selectively attend to informative tokens, thereby enabling detection of weak, rare, and sparsely located features? We address these questions theoretically in a sparse-token classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nicholas Barnfield , Hugo Cui , Yue M. Lu

Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Sinong Wang , Belinda Z. Li , Madian Khabsa , Han Fang , Hao Ma

In this paper we propose augmenting Vision Transformer models with learnable memory tokens. Our approach allows the model to adapt to new tasks, using few parameters, while optionally preserving its capabilities on previously learned tasks.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Mark Sandler , Andrey Zhmoginov , Max Vladymyrov , Andrew Jackson

Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Simon Schug , Seijin Kobayashi , Yassir Akram , João Sacramento , Razvan Pascanu

The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yihe Dong , Lorenzo Noci , Mikhail Khodak , Mufan Li

Pairwise dot product-based attention allows Transformers to exchange information between tokens in an input-dependent way, and is key to their success across diverse applications in language and vision. However, a typical Transformer model…

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

Neural networks using transformer-based architectures have recently demonstrated great power and flexibility in modeling sequences of many types. One of the core components of transformer networks is the attention layer, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Matthew Spellings

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Yang Li , Liangzhen Lai , Yuan Shangguan , Forrest N. Iandola , Zhaoheng Ni , Ernie Chang , Yangyang Shi , Vikas Chandra

Attention-based architectures have become ubiquitous in machine learning, yet our understanding of the reasons for their effectiveness remains limited. This work proposes a new way to understand self-attention networks: we show that their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Yihe Dong , Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning in numerous fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Their strength lies in their attention mechanism, which allows for the discovering of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Uladzislau Yorsh , Martin Holeňa , Ondřej Bojar , David Herel

Attention-based transformers have been remarkably successful at modeling generative processes across various domains and modalities. In this paper, we study the behavior of transformers on data drawn from \kth Markov processes, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Nived Rajaraman , Marco Bondaschi , Kannan Ramchandran , Michael Gastpar , Ashok Vardhan Makkuva

Linearization of attention using various kernel approximation and kernel learning techniques has shown promise. Past methods used a subset of combinations of component functions and weight matrices within the random feature paradigm. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Duke Nguyen , Du Yin , Aditya Joshi , Flora Salim

Attention models are typically learned by optimizing one of three standard loss functions that are variously called -- soft attention, hard attention, and latent variable marginal likelihood (LVML) attention. All three paradigms are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Rahul Vashisht , Harish G. Ramaswamy

Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Chong Li , Shaonan Wang , Yunhao Zhang , Jiajun Zhang , Chengqing Zong

Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Aurko Roy , Mohammad Saffar , Ashish Vaswani , David Grangier