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We present a framework for using transformer networks as universal computers by programming them with specific weights and placing them in a loop. Our input sequence acts as a punchcard, consisting of instructions and memory for data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Angeliki Giannou , Shashank Rajput , Jy-yong Sohn , Kangwook Lee , Jason D. Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Theoretical efforts to prove advantages of Transformers in comparison with classical architectures such as feedforward and recurrent neural networks have mostly focused on representational power. In this work, we take an alternative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Alireza Mousavi-Hosseini , Clayton Sanford , Denny Wu , Murat A. Erdogdu

Transformer-based language models (LMs) are at the core of modern NLP, but their internal prediction construction process is opaque and largely not understood. In this work, we make a substantial step towards unveiling this underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Mor Geva , Avi Caciularu , Kevin Ro Wang , Yoav Goldberg

Transformers are deep neural network architectures that underpin the recent successes of large language models. Unlike more classical architectures that can be viewed as point-to-point maps, a Transformer acts as a measure-to-measure map…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-16 Borjan Geshkovski , Philippe Rigollet , Domènec Ruiz-Balet

Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Chenyang Zhang , Qingyue Zhao , Quanquan Gu , Yuan Cao

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Joshua S. Schiffman

Transformers have become the de-facto standard model in artificial intelligence since 2017 despite numerous shortcomings ranging from energy inefficiency to hallucinations. Research has made a lot of progress in improving elements of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Johannes Schneider

Human brains are commonly modeled as networks of Regions of Interest (ROIs) and their connections for the understanding of brain functions and mental disorders. Recently, Transformer-based models have been studied over different types of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Xuan Kan , Wei Dai , Hejie Cui , Zilong Zhang , Ying Guo , Carl Yang

Since its introduction in 2017, Transformer has emerged as the leading neural network architecture, catalyzing revolutionary advancements in many AI disciplines. The key innovation in Transformer is a Self-Attention (SA) mechanism designed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Yueyao Yu , Yin Zhang

We study how information propagates in decoder-only Transformers, which are the architectural backbone of most existing frontier large language models (LLMs). We rely on a theoretical signal propagation analysis -- specifically, we analyse…

Transformer networks have achieved remarkable empirical success across a wide range of applications, yet their theoretical expressive power remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the expressive capabilities of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Linyan Gu , Lihua Yang , Feng Zhou

The transformer architecture has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in modern artificial intelligence, among which the capability of implicitly learning an internal model during inference time is widely believed to play a key role in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhiheng Chen , Ruofan Wu , Guanhua Fang

Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Ameya Velingker , Balaji Venkatachalam , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient…

In this paper we present a synthesis of the work performed on two inference algorithms: the Pearl's belief propagation (BP) algorithm applied to Bayesian networks without loops (i.e. polytree) and the Loopy belief propagation (LBP)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-06 Amen Ajroud , Mohamed Nazih Omri , Habib Youssef , Salem Benferhat

Astounding results from Transformer models on natural language tasks have intrigued the vision community to study their application to computer vision problems. Among their salient benefits, Transformers enable modeling long dependencies…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Salman Khan , Muzammal Naseer , Munawar Hayat , Syed Waqas Zamir , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Mubarak Shah

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated a strong capability in modeling graph structures by addressing the intrinsic limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), such as over-smoothing and over-squashing. Recent studies have proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Chaohao Yuan , Kangfei Zhao , Ercan Engin Kuruoglu , Liang Wang , Tingyang Xu , Wenbing Huang , Deli Zhao , Hong Cheng , Yu Rong