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We study the power of cross-attention in the Transformer architecture within the context of transfer learning for machine translation, and extend the findings of studies into cross-attention when training from scratch. We conduct a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Mozhdeh Gheini , Xiang Ren , Jonathan May

Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Hongru Yang , Bhavya Kailkhura , Zhangyang Wang , Yingbin Liang

Error correction code is a major part of the communication physical layer, ensuring the reliable transfer of data over noisy channels. Recently, neural decoders were shown to outperform classical decoding techniques. However, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Yoni Choukroun , Lior Wolf

The smoothness of the transformer architecture has been extensively studied in the context of generalization, training stability, and adversarial robustness. However, its role in transfer learning remains poorly understood. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ambroise Odonnat , Laetitia Chapel , Romain Tavenard , Ievgen Redko

Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaojie Xia , Huigang Zhang , Chaoliang Zhong , Jun Sun , Yusuke Oishi

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

The attention mechanisms are playing a boosting role in advancements in sequence-to-sequence problems. Transformer architecture achieved new state of the art results in machine translation, and it's variants are since being introduced in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Abhishek Niranjan , M Ali Basha Shaik , Kushal Verma

Large Transformer models routinely achieve state-of-the-art results on a number of tasks but training these models can be prohibitively costly, especially on long sequences. We introduce two techniques to improve the efficiency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Nikita Kitaev , Łukasz Kaiser , Anselm Levskaya

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

Slim attention shrinks the context memory size by 2x for transformer models with MHA (multi-head attention), which can speed up inference by up to 2x for large context windows. Slim attention is an exact, mathematically identical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Nils Graef , Andrew Wasielewski

Attention-based transformers have become the standard architecture in many deep learning fields, primarily due to their ability to model long-range dependencies and handle variable-length input sequences. However, the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Kalle Hilsenbek

While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance, they tend to lack transparency in prediction. The pursuit of greater interpretability in neural networks often results in a degradation of their original performance. Some…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Hefeng Wu , Hao Jiang , Keze Wang , Ziyi Tang , Xianghuan He , Liang Lin

Transformers achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness across many tasks, but an understanding of their inductive biases and how those biases differ from other neural network architectures remains elusive. In this work, we identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Bhavya Vasudeva , Deqing Fu , Tianyi Zhou , Elliott Kau , Youqi Huang , Vatsal Sharan

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

In this paper, we investigate the continual learning of Vision Transformers (ViT) for the challenging exemplar-free scenario, with special focus on how to efficiently distill the knowledge of its crucial self-attention mechanism (SAM). Our…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Francesco Pelosin , Saurav Jha , Andrea Torsello , Bogdan Raducanu , Joost van de Weijer

Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-12 Cristiano Capone , Luca Falorsi

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

Recently, Transformer based models have shown competitive automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. One key factor in the success of these models is the multi-head attention mechanism. However, for trained models, we have previously…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

Semantic segmentation is a challenging problem due to difficulties in modeling context in complex scenes and class confusions along boundaries. Most literature either focuses on context modeling or boundary refinement, which is less…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Fangrui Zhu , Yi Zhu , Li Zhang , Chongruo Wu , Yanwei Fu , Mu Li