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The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Language recognition tasks are fundamental in natural language processing (NLP) and have been widely used to benchmark the performance of large language models (LLMs). These tasks also play a crucial role in explaining the working…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Nicolas Duminy , Sao Mai Nguyen , Junshuai Zhu , Dominique Duhaut , Jerome Kerdreux

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

The rapid progress seen in terms of large-scale generative AI is largely based on the attention mechanism. It is conversely non-trivial to conceive small-scale applications for which attention-based architectures outperform traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Claudius Gros

Stepwise inference protocols, such as scratchpads and chain-of-thought, help language models solve complex problems by decomposing them into a sequence of simpler subproblems. Despite the significant gain in performance achieved via these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Mikail Khona , Maya Okawa , Jan Hula , Rahul Ramesh , Kento Nishi , Robert Dick , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Hidenori Tanaka

Self-attention, an architectural motif designed to model long-range interactions in sequential data, has driven numerous recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and beyond. This work provides a theoretical analysis of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Benjamin L. Edelman , Surbhi Goel , Sham Kakade , Cyril Zhang

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Ameya Velingker , Balaji Venkatachalam , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland

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

Attention is fundamental to cognition, yet it remains a challenge to understand attention in tasks approaching real-world complexity. Here, we approached this problem by modeling gaze patterns of monkeys playing Pac-Man. We first show a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-12 Zhongqiao Lin , Yunwei Li , Tianming Yang

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Nicolas Zucchet , Francesco d'Angelo , Andrew K. Lampinen , Stephanie C. Y. Chan

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Wei Chen , Jingxi Yu , Zichen Miao , Qiang Qiu

Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Valérie Castin , Pierre Ablin , José Antonio Carrillo , Gabriel Peyré

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

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