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Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell , Mrinmaya Sachan

Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Xiwen Chen , Peijie Qiu , Wenhui Zhu , Huayu Li , Hao Wang , Aristeidis Sotiras , Yalin Wang , Abolfazl Razi

Interpretable Multi-Task Learning can be expressed as learning a sparse graph of the task relationship based on the prediction performance of the learned models. Since many natural phenomenon exhibit sparse structures, enforcing sparsity on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-14 Francesco Alesiani , Shujian Yu , Ammar Shaker , Wenzhe Yin

We present a novel methodology to jointly perform multi-task learning and infer intrinsic relationship among tasks by an interpretable and sparse graph. Unlike existing multi-task learning methodologies, the graph structure is not assumed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Shujian Yu , Francesco Alesiani , Ammar Shaker , Wenzhe Yin

While humans and animals learn incrementally during their lifetimes and exploit their experience to solve new tasks, standard deep reinforcement learning methods specialize to solve only one task at a time. As a result, the information they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Diego Gomez , Nicanor Quijano , Luis Felipe Giraldo

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Chenyang Zhang , Yuan Cao

Next to scaling considerations, architectural design choices profoundly shape the solution space of transformers. In this work, we analyze the solutions simple transformer blocks implement when tackling the histogram task: counting items in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Freya Behrens , Luca Biggio , Lenka Zdeborová

Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuval Ran-Milo , Yotam Alexander , Shahar Mendel , Nadav Cohen

While attention has been empirically shown to improve model performance, it lacks a rigorous mathematical justification. This short paper establishes a novel connection between attention mechanisms and multinomial regression. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr

This paper presents a novel approach to imitation learning from observations, where an autoregressive mixture of experts model is deployed to fit the underlying policy. The parameters of the model are learned via a two-stage framework. By…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Renzi Wang , Flavia Sofia Acerbo , Tong Duy Son , Panagiotis Patrinos

Vision transformer (ViT) expands the success of transformer models from sequential data to images. The model decomposes an image into many smaller patches and arranges them into a sequence. Multi-head self-attentions are then applied to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Yiran Li , Junpeng Wang , Xin Dai , Liang Wang , Chin-Chia Michael Yeh , Yan Zheng , Wei Zhang , Kwan-Liu Ma

We implement a network-based approach to study expertise in a complex real-world task: operating particle accelerators. Most real-world tasks we learn and perform (e.g., driving cars, operating complex machines, solving mathematical…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Roussel Rahman , Jane Shtalenkova , Aashwin Ananda Mishra , Wan-Lin Hu

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Qingru Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Sheng Zha , Tuo Zhao

The assumption that data samples are independently identically distributed is the backbone of many learning algorithms. Nevertheless, datasets often exhibit rich structure in practice, and we argue that there exist some unknown order within…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Han Zhao , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Nebojsa Jojic

Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Penghao Yu , Haotian Jiang , Zeyu Bao , Ruoxi Yu , Qianxiao Li

Compression has been a critical lens to understand the success of Transformers. In the past, we have typically taken the target distribution as a criterion to evaluate a model's compression performance. Nevertheless,it often remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yuandong Tian , Yiping Wang , Beidi Chen , Simon Du

Transformer architectures can solve unseen tasks based on input-output pairs in a given prompt due to in-context learning (ICL). Existing theoretical studies on ICL have mainly focused on linear regression tasks, often with i.i.d. inputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Yanna Ding , Songtao Lu , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki , Jianxi Gao

This paper introduces a framework specifically designed for sparse and irregular time series {risk estimation}. It is based on a Transformer Autoencoder with local attention, which leverages the powerful pattern identification capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Panteleimon Rodis