Related papers: Attention Sinks Are Provably Necessary in Softmax …

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…

An essential component of modern recurrent sequence models is the forget gate. While Transformers do not have an explicit recurrent form, we show that a forget gate can be naturally incorporated into Transformers by down-weighting the…

We prove that with linear transformations, both (i) two-layer self-attention and (ii) one-layer self-attention followed by a softmax function are universal approximators for continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on compact domains. Our…

Attention sinks are defined as tokens that attract disproportionate attention. While these have been studied in single modality transformers, their cross-modal impact in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLM) remains largely unexplored: are…

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Training stability is of great importance to Transformers. In this work, we investigate the training dynamics of Transformers by examining the evolution of the attention layers. In particular, we track the attention entropy for each…

Transformers underpin modern large language models (LLMs) and are commonly assumed to be behaviorally unstructured at random initialization, with all meaningful preferences emerging only through large-scale training. We challenge this…

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Recent advances in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their quadratic computational complexity concerning sequence length remains a significant bottleneck…

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…

Transformer self-attention can be interpreted as a gradient flow on the unit sphere, in which tokens evolve under softmax interaction potentials and tend to form clusters. While prior work has established clustering behavior for single-head…

Neural architectures tend to fit their data with relatively simple functions. This "simplicity bias" is widely regarded as key to their success. This paper explores the limits of this principle. Building on recent findings that the…

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…

Vision transformers using self-attention or its proposed alternatives have demonstrated promising results in many image related tasks. However, the underpinning inductive bias of attention is not well understood. To address this issue, this…

Large language models frequently exhibit hallucinations: fluent and confident outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the input context. While recent hallucination detection methods have explored various features derived from…

Vision transformers have emerged as a powerful tool across a wide range of applications, yet their inner workings remain only partially understood. In this work, we examine the phenomenon of massive tokens - tokens with exceptionally high…

Previous research observed accuracy degradation when replacing the attention softmax with a point-wise activation such as ReLU. In the context of vision transformers, we find that this degradation is mitigated when dividing by sequence…

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has become a critical mechanism for removing undesired data, knowledge, or behaviors from pre-trained models while retaining their general utility. Yet, with the rise of open-weight LLMs, we ask: can…

To enhance the computational efficiency of quantized Transformers, we replace the dot-product and Softmax-based attention with an alternative mechanism involving addition and ReLU activation only. This side-steps the expansion to double…