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Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems,…
The attention mechanism is a pivotal element within the transformer architecture, making a substantial contribution to its exceptional performance. Within this attention mechanism, Softmax is an imperative component that enables the model…
The Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem is integral to the functioning of power systems, aiming to optimize generation dispatch while adhering to technical and operational constraints. These constraints are far from straightforward; they…
While the Transformer architecture has achieved remarkable success across various domains, a thorough theoretical foundation explaining its optimization dynamics is yet to be fully developed. In this study, we aim to bridge this…
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…
Flow based generative models have charted an impressive path across multiple visual generation tasks by adhering to a simple principle: learning velocity representations of a linear interpolant. However, we observe that training velocity…
Sparse inversion and classification problems are ubiquitous in modern data science and imaging. They are often formulated as non-smooth minimisation problems. In sparse inversion, we minimise, e.g., the sum of a data fidelity term and an…
Despite the widespread use of gradient-based algorithms for optimizing high-dimensional non-convex functions, understanding their ability of finding good minima instead of being trapped in spurious ones remains to a large extent an open…
Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…
Strong semantic representations improve the convergence and generation quality of diffusion and flow models. Existing approaches largely rely on external models, which require separate training, operate on misaligned objectives, and exhibit…
Normalizing flows are a promising tool for modeling probability distributions in physical systems. While state-of-the-art flows accurately approximate distributions and energies, applications in physics additionally require smooth energies…
Softmax is popular normalization method used in machine learning. Deep learning solutions like Transformer or BERT use the softmax function intensively, so it is worthwhile to optimize its performance. This article presents our methodology…
Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…
Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…
We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…
Current methods for the interpretability of discriminative deep neural networks commonly rely on the model's input-gradients, i.e., the gradients of the output logits w.r.t. the inputs. The common assumption is that these input-gradients…
We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…
In view of solving convex optimization problems with noisy gradient input, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of gradient-like flows under stochastic disturbances. Specifically, we focus on the widely studied class of mirror descent schemes…
Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…