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The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Michael Hassid , Hao Peng , Daniel Rotem , Jungo Kasai , Ivan Montero , Noah A. Smith , Roy Schwartz

In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tiberiu Musat

The quadratic computational cost of the self-attention mechanism is a primary challenge in scaling Transformer models. While attention sparsity is widely studied as a technique to improve computational efficiency, it is almost universally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sagar Gandhi , Vishal Gandhi

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…

Deep learning with differential privacy (DP) has garnered significant attention over the past years, leading to the development of numerous methods aimed at enhancing model accuracy and training efficiency. This paper delves into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Youlong Ding , Xueyang Wu , Yining Meng , Yonggang Luo , Hao Wang , Weike Pan

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

We propose a unified framework for adaptive routing in multitask, multimodal prediction settings where data heterogeneity and task interactions vary across samples. Motivated by applications in psychotherapy where structured assessments and…

The architecture of Transformer is based entirely on self-attention, and has been shown to outperform models that employ recurrence on sequence transduction tasks such as machine translation. The superior performance of Transformer has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-29 Vikas K. Garg , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Hsiang-Fu Yu

Attention Residuals replace standard additive residual connections with learned softmax attention over previous layer outputs, enabling selective cross-layer routing. However, standard Attention Residuals still attend over cumulative hidden…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Cheng Luo , Zefan Cai , Junjie Hu

Transformers resist surgical control. Ablating an attention head identified as critical for capitalization produces minimal behavioral change because distributed redundancy compensates for damage. This Hydra effect renders interpretability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 J. Clayton Kerce

The deployment of deep neural networks in real-world applications is mostly restricted by their high inference costs. Extensive efforts have been made to improve the accuracy with expert-designed or algorithm-searched architectures.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Shaofeng Cai , Yao Shu , Wei Wang , Beng Chin Ooi

A multi-channel quantum router with four nodal cavities is constructed by two coupled-resonator waveguides and four single cavities. We can achieve directional routing by adjusting the probability of photon exiting from the specified port…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-06-21 Xu Yang , Lei Tan , Wu-Ming Liu

Continual learning in transformers is commonly addressed through parameter-efficient adaptation: prompts, adapters, or LoRA modules are specialized per task while the backbone remains frozen. Although effective in controlled multi-epoch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Alessio Masano , Giovanni Bellitto , Dipam Goswani , Joost Van de Weijer , Concetto Spampinato

Standard attention mechanisms in transformers employ static token representations that remain unchanged across all pair-wise computations in each layer. This limits their representational alignment with the potentially diverse relational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hunjae Lee , Corey Clark

Traditional transformer models often allocate a fixed amount of computational resources to every input token, leading to inefficient and unnecessary computation. To address this, the Mixture of Depths (MoD) was introduced to dynamically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Shwai He , Tao Ge , Guoheng Sun , Bowei Tian , Xiaoyang Wang , Dong Yu

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet the choice of which model to use often involves a trade-off between performance and cost. More powerful models, though effective, come with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Isaac Ong , Amjad Almahairi , Vincent Wu , Wei-Lin Chiang , Tianhao Wu , Joseph E. Gonzalez , M Waleed Kadous , Ion Stoica

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nan Ding , Xinjie Fan , Zhenzhong Lan , Dale Schuurmans , Radu Soricut

We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Florent Draye , Anson Lei , Hsiao-Ru Pan , Ingmar Posner , Bernhard Schölkopf

State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Karim Ahmed , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher