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Related papers: On the Computational Hardness of Transformers

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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

Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ruoxi Yu , Haotian Jiang , Jingpu Cheng , Penghao Yu , Qianxiao Li , Zhong Li

Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input's length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Angelos Katharopoulos , Apoorv Vyas , Nikolaos Pappas , François Fleuret

This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Weicheng Ma , Kai Zhang , Renze Lou , Lili Wang , Soroush Vosoughi

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nurullah Sevim , Ege Ozan Özyedek , Furkan Şahinuç , Aykut Koç

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Transformers evaluated in a single, fixed-depth pass are provably limited in expressive power to the constant-depth circuit class TC0. Running a Transformer autoregressively removes that ceiling -- first in next-token prediction and, more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Mrinal Mathur , Mike Doan , Barak Pearlmutter , Sergey Plis

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

After their initial success in natural language processing, transformer architectures have rapidly gained traction in computer vision, providing state-of-the-art results for tasks such as image classification, detection, segmentation, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Hugo Touvron , Matthieu Cord , Alaaeldin El-Nouby , Jakob Verbeek , Hervé Jégou

The next generation of cosmological surveys is expected to generate unprecedented high-quality data, consequently increasing the already substantial computational costs of Bayesian statistical methods. This will pose a significant challenge…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2024-03-22 Evan Saraivanov , Kunhao Zhong , Vivian Miranda , Supranta S. Boruah , Tim Eifler , Elisabeth Krause

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

It is straightforward to design an unbiased gradient estimator that stochastically cuts the backpropagation flow through any part of a computational graph. By cutting the parts that have little effect on the computation, one can potentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Sergey Pankov , Georges Harik

Video transformer naturally incurs a heavier computation burden than a static vision transformer, as the former processes $T$ times longer sequence than the latter under the current attention of quadratic complexity $(T^2N^2)$. The existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Hao Zhang , Lechao Cheng , Yanbin Hao , Chong-Wah Ngo

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

Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years, and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Yelysei Bondarenko , Markus Nagel , Tijmen Blankevoort

Multi-head attention powers Transformer networks, the primary deep learning architecture behind the success of large language models (LLMs). Yet, the theoretical advantages of multi-head versus single-head attention, beyond mere parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde

Since transformer was firstly published in 2017, several works have been proposed to optimize it. However, the major structure of transformer remains unchanged, ignoring one of its main intrinsic limitations, which is the same static value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Xiaowei Wang

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…

Following their success in natural language processing (NLP), there has been a shift towards transformer models in computer vision. While transformers perform well and offer promising multi-tasking performance, due to their high compute…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Maximilian Augustin , Syed Shakib Sarwar , Mostafa Elhoushi , Sai Qian Zhang , Yuecheng Li , Barbara De Salvo