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Related papers: Directional Routing in Transformers

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Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Zheng-An Chen , Tao Luo

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Harshwardhan Fartale , Ashish Kattamuri , Rahul Raja , Arpita Vats , Ishita Prasad , Akshata Kishore Moharir

Standard transformers entangle all computation in a single residual stream, obscuring which components perform which functions. We introduce the Dual-Stream Transformer, which decomposes the residual stream into two functionally distinct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 J. Clayton Kerce , Alexis Fox

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

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

We localize the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

Advancements in deep learning are driven by training models with increasingly larger numbers of parameters, which in turn heightens the computational demands. To address this issue, Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) models have been proposed to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Advait Gadhikar , Souptik Kumar Majumdar , Niclas Popp , Piyapat Saranrittichai , Martin Rapp , Lukas Schott

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

While routing in wireless networks has been studied extensively, existing protocols are typically designed for a specific set of network conditions and so cannot accommodate any drastic changes in those conditions. For instance, protocols…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Victoria Manfredi , Alicia Wolfe , Bing Wang , Xiaolan Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Deep learning models have gained great success in many real-world applications. However, most existing networks are typically designed in heuristic manners, thus lack of rigorous mathematical principles and derivations. Several recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-12-18 Risheng Liu , Xin Fan , Shichao Cheng , Xiangyu Wang , Zhongxuan Luo

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

Sequential recommendation requires the recommender to capture the evolving behavior characteristics from logged user behavior data for accurate recommendations. However, user behavior sequences are viewed as a script with multiple ongoing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Zhiyu Yao , Xinyang Chen , Sinan Wang , Qinyan Dai , Yumeng Li , Tanchao Zhu , Mingsheng Long

Despite progress across a broad range of applications, Transformers have limited success in systematic generalization. The situation is especially frustrating in the case of algorithmic tasks, where they often fail to find intuitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Róbert Csordás , Kazuki Irie , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Transformer architectures are designed by trial and error: the number of attention heads, the depth, and the head size are fixed before training begins, with no mathematical principle to guide the choice. The result is systematic structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Giansalvo Cirrincione

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Paul Michel , Omer Levy , Graham Neubig

Large Language Models (LLMs) process every token through all layers of a transformer stack, causing wasted computation on simple queries and insufficient flexibility for harder ones that need deeper reasoning. Adaptive-depth methods can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ahmed Heakl , Martin Gubri , Salman Khan , Sangdoo Yun , Seong Joon Oh

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

As the core building block of vision transformers, attention is a powerful tool to capture long-range dependency. However, such power comes at a cost: it incurs a huge computation burden and heavy memory footprint as pairwise token…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Lei Zhu , Xinjiang Wang , Zhanghan Ke , Wayne Zhang , Rynson Lau