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Related papers: The Topological Trouble With Transformers

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Transformers have become the foundational architecture for a broad spectrum of sequence modeling applications, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing, vision, and beyond. However, their theoretical limitations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Michelle Yuan , Weiyi Sun , Amir H. Rezaeian , Jyotika Singh , Sandip Ghoshal , Yao-Ting Wang , Miguel Ballesteros , Yassine Benajiba

Transformers have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their monolithic architecture presents challenges in interpretability, adaptability, and scalability. This paper introduces a novel modular Transformer architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Zhenyu Guo , Wenguang Chen

The extension of deep learning towards temporal data processing is gaining an increasing research interest. In this paper we investigate the properties of state dynamics developed in successive levels of deep recurrent neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-05 Claudio Gallicchio

Matching animal-like flexibility in recognition and the ability to quickly incorporate new information remains difficult. Limits are yet to be adequately addressed in neural models and recognition algorithms. This work proposes a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Tsvi Achler

Topology optimization enables the design of highly efficient and complex structures, but conventional iterative methods, such as SIMP-based approaches, often suffer from high computational costs and sensitivity to initial conditions.…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Aaron Lutheran , Srijan Das , Alireza Tabarraei

Reservoir computing is a popular approach to design recurrent neural networks, due to its training simplicity and approximation performance. The recurrent part of these networks is not trained (e.g., via gradient descent), making them…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Pietro Verzelli , Cesare Alippi , Lorenzo Livi , Peter Tino

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

State-space models (SSMs) have emerged as a potential alternative architecture for building large language models (LLMs) compared to the previously ubiquitous transformer architecture. One theoretical weakness of transformers is that they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 William Merrill , Jackson Petty , Ashish Sabharwal

What computational structure are we building into large language models when we train them on next-token prediction? Here, we present evidence that this structure is given by the meta-dynamics of belief updating over hidden states of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Adam S. Shai , Sarah E. Marzen , Lucas Teixeira , Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel , Paul M. Riechers

Deep Learning architectures, and in particular Transformers, are conventionally viewed as a composition of layers. These layers are actually often obtained as the sum of two contributions: a residual path that copies the input and the…

Over the last years, state-tracking tasks, particularly permutation composition, have become a testbed to understand the limits of sequence models architectures like Transformers and RNNs (linear and non-linear). However, these are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Julien Siems , Riccardo Grazzi , Kirill Kalinin , Hitesh Ballani , Babak Rahmani

Transformers are the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, but there is growing interest in models that use a fixed-size latent state that does not depend on the sequence length, which we refer to as "generalized state space models"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Samy Jelassi , David Brandfonbrener , Sham M. Kakade , Eran Malach

Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Liangqiong Qu , Yuyin Zhou , Paul Pu Liang , Yingda Xia , Feifei Wang , Ehsan Adeli , Li Fei-Fei , Daniel Rubin

Memory retention challenges in deep neural architectures have ongoing limitations in the ability to process and recall extended contextual information. Token dependencies degrade as sequence length increases, leading to a decline in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Frederick Dillon , Gregor Halvorsen , Simon Tattershall , Magnus Rowntree , Gareth Vanderpool

Transformer-based models can perform complicated reasoning by generating reasoning paths token by token. While effective, this approach often requires generating thousands of tokens to solve a single problem, which can be slow and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jiayu Liu , Zhenya Huang , Xuan Yang , Tianyun Ji , Anya Sims , Hao Xu , Enhong Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

The Transformer architecture excels in a variety of language modeling tasks, outperforming traditional neural architectures such as RNN and LSTM. This is partially due to its elimination of recurrent connections, which allows for parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Xiang Zhang , Muhammad Abdul-Mageed , Laks V. S. Lakshmanan

We extend the recent latent recurrent modeling to sequential input streams. By interleaving fast, recurrent latent updates with self-organizational ability between slow observation updates, our method facilitates the learning of stable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Shota Takashiro , Masanori Koyama , Takeru Miyato , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo , Kohei Hayashi

Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

A longstanding challenge for the Machine Learning community is the one of developing models that are capable of processing and learning from very long sequences of data. The outstanding results of Transformers-based networks (e.g., Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Matteo Tiezzi , Michele Casoni , Alessandro Betti , Tommaso Guidi , Marco Gori , Stefano Melacci

Real-world data generation often involves complex inter-dependencies among instances, violating the IID-data hypothesis of standard learning paradigms and posing a challenge for uncovering the geometric structures for learning desired…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Qitian Wu , Chenxiao Yang , Wentao Zhao , Yixuan He , David Wipf , Junchi Yan