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We introduce Monte-Carlo Attention (MCA), a randomized approximation method for reducing the computational cost of self-attention mechanisms in Transformer architectures. MCA exploits the fact that the importance of each token in an input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Hyunjun Kim , JeongGil Ko

Transformer models rely on self-attention to capture token dependencies but face challenges in effectively integrating positional information while allowing multi-head attention (MHA) flexibility. Prior methods often model semantic and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Jintian Shao , Hongyi Huang , Jiayi Wu , Beiwen Zhang , ZhiYu Wu , You Shan , MingKai Zheng

Recent work has shown the potential of transformers for computer vision applications. An image is first partitioned into patches, which are then used as input tokens for the attention mechanism. Due to the expensive quadratic cost of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Shelly Sheynin , Sagie Benaim , Adam Polyak , Lior Wolf

We present the Condensate Theorem: attention sparsity is a learned topological property, not an architectural constraint. Through empirical analysis of trained language models, we find that attention mass concentrates on a distinct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jorge L. Ruiz Williams

Due to the highly parallelizable architecture, Transformer is faster to train than RNN-based models and popularly used in machine translation tasks. However, at inference time, each output word requires all the hidden states of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Chengyi Wang , Shuangzhi Wu , Shujie Liu

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

Despite the remarkable empirical performance of Transformers, their theoretical understanding remains elusive. Here, we consider a deep multi-head self-attention network, that is closely related to Transformers yet analytically tractable.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Lorenzo Tiberi , Francesca Mignacco , Kazuki Irie , Haim Sompolinsky

Transformers have become the dominant architecture across a wide range of domains, largely due to the effectiveness of multi-head attention in capturing diverse representation subspaces. However, standard multi-head attention activates all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Bilal Faye , Abdoulaye Mbaye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

In decoder-based LLMs, the representation of a given layer serves two purposes: as input to the next layer during the computation of the current token; and as input to the attention mechanism of future tokens. In this work, we show that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Amit Ben-Artzy , Roy Schwartz

Transformers are state-of-the-art in a wide range of NLP tasks and have also been applied to many real-world products. Understanding the reliability and certainty of transformer model predictions is crucial for building trustable machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Jiahuan Pei , Cheng Wang , György Szarvas

The multi-head self-attention of popular transformer models is widely used within Natural Language Processing (NLP), including for the task of extractive summarization. With the goal of analyzing and pruning the parameter-heavy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Wen Xiao , Patrick Huber , Giuseppe Carenini

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

Transformer-based video diffusion models (VDMs) deliver state-of-the-art video generation quality but are constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, making long sequences and high resolutions computationally expensive. While…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Mohsen Ghafoorian , Denis Korzhenkov , Amirhossein Habibian

We present FIT: a transformer-based architecture with efficient self-attention and adaptive computation. Unlike original transformers, which operate on a single sequence of data tokens, we divide the data tokens into groups, with each group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Ting Chen , Lala Li

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on complex reasoning tasks, yet little is known about their ability to internally evaluate problem difficulty, which is an essential capability for adaptive reasoning and efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sunbowen Lee , Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Jialiang Zhang , Yicheng Gong , Shiwen Ni , Min Yang , Xiaoyu Shen

Deep learning employs multi-layer neural networks trained via the backpropagation algorithm. This approach has achieved success across many domains and relies on adaptive gradient methods such as the Adam optimizer. Sequence modeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esmail Gumaan

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

Deep pre-trained Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results over a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. By learning rich language knowledge with millions of parameters, these models are usually…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Zhengyan Zhang , Fanchao Qi , Zhiyuan Liu , Qun Liu , Maosong Sun

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang