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We introduce the Momentum Transformer, an attention-based deep-learning architecture, which outperforms benchmark time-series momentum and mean-reversion trading strategies. Unlike state-of-the-art Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Kieran Wood , Sven Giegerich , Stephen Roberts , Stefan Zohren

The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to…

Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in modeling complex language patterns but face significant computational costs during inference, especially with long inputs due to the attention mechanism's memory overhead. We observe…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Ruiqing Yan , Linghan Zheng , Xingbo Du , Han Zou , Yufeng Guo , Jianfei Yang

We give a novel logical characterization of encoder-decoder transformers, the foundational architecture for LLMs that also sees use in various settings that benefit from cross-attention. We study such transformers over text in the practical…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Veeti Ahvonen , Damian Heiman , Antti Kuusisto , Miguel Moreno , Matias Selin

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

Recently, the Transformer model that is based solely on attention mechanisms, has advanced the state-of-the-art on various machine translation tasks. However, recent studies reveal that the lack of recurrence hinders its further improvement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Jie Hao , Xing Wang , Baosong Yang , Longyue Wang , Jinfeng Zhang , Zhaopeng Tu

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

Recent papers in neural machine translation have proposed the strict use of attention mechanisms over previous standards such as recurrent and convolutional neural networks (RNNs and CNNs). We propose that by running traditionally stacked…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Julian Richard Medina , Jugal Kalita

Transformers are a neural network architecture originally developed for natural language processing, which have since become a foundational tool for solving a wide range of problems, including text, audio, image processing, reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Jordi de la Torre

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

What is the computational model behind a Transformer? Where recurrent neural networks have direct parallels in finite state machines, allowing clear discussion and thought around architecture variants or trained models, Transformers have no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Gail Weiss , Yoav Goldberg , Eran Yahav

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Jiaoda Li , Jennifer C. White , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

In this work, we present a generalized formulation of the Transformer algorithm by reinterpreting its core mechanisms within the framework of Path Integral formalism. In this perspective, the attention mechanism is recast as a process that…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-05-02 Won-Gi Paeng , Daesuk Kwon , Kyungwon Jeong , Honggyo Suh

Transformer-based language models display impressive reasoning-like behavior, yet remain brittle on tasks that require stable symbolic manipulation. This paper develops a unified perspective on these phenomena by interpreting self-attention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar

Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Zizheng Pan , Bohan Zhuang , Haoyu He , Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai

The current large language models are mainly based on decode-only structure transformers, which have great in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. It is generally believed that the important foundation of its ICL capability is the induction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Mingyu Xu , Wei Cheng , Bingning Wang , Weipeng Chen

Multi-layer models with multiple attention heads per layer provide superior translation quality compared to simpler and shallower models, but determining what source context is most relevant to each target word is more challenging as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-01 Thomas Zenkel , Joern Wuebker , John DeNero

Attention is an important mechanism that can be employed for a variety of deep learning models across many different domains and tasks. This survey provides an overview of the most important attention mechanisms proposed in the literature.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Gianni Brauwers , Flavius Frasincar