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Transformers have excelled in many tasks including vision. However, efficient deployment of transformer models in low-latency or high-throughput applications is hindered by the computation in the attention mechanism which involves expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-12 John Yang , Le An , Su Inn Park

Transformers have outperformed recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in natural language generation. But this comes with a significant computational cost, as the attention mechanism's complexity scales quadratically with sequence length.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Jungo Kasai , Hao Peng , Yizhe Zhang , Dani Yogatama , Gabriel Ilharco , Nikolaos Pappas , Yi Mao , Weizhu Chen , Noah A. Smith

Softmax is popular normalization method used in machine learning. Deep learning solutions like Transformer or BERT use the softmax function intensively, so it is worthwhile to optimize its performance. This article presents our methodology…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Jacek Czaja , Michal Gallus , Tomasz Patejko , Jian Tang

The Transformer model is widely used in various application areas of machine learning, such as natural language processing. This paper investigates the approximation of the H\"older continuous function class…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Yang Wang , Bokai Yan

Transformer attention is typically implemented using softmax normalization, which enforces attention weights with unit sum normalization. While effective in many settings, this constraint can limit flexibility in controlling attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Jeongin Bae , Baeseong Park , Gunho Park , Minsub Kim , Joonhyung Lee , Junhee Yoo , Sunghyeon Woo , Jiwon Ryu , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Deep learning employs multi-layer neural networks trained via the backpropagation algorithm. This approach has achieved success across many domains and relies on adaptive gradient methods such as the Adam optimizer. Sequence modeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esmail Gumaan

Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Yichuan Deng , Zhihang Li , Zhao Song

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

While the approximation properties of single-layer Transformer architectures have been studied in recent works, a rigorous theoretical understanding of the multi-layer setting remains limited. In this work, we establish that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Penghao Yu , Haotian Jiang , Zeyu Bao , Qianxiao Li

In this work, we consider the approximation of a large class of bounded functions, with minimal regularity assumptions, by ReLU neural networks. We show that the approximation error can be bounded from above by a quantity proportional to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-27 Owen Davis , Gianluca Geraci , Mohammad Motamed

Large language models (LLMs) have numerous real-life applications across various domains, such as natural language translation, sentiment analysis, language modeling, chatbots and conversational agents, creative writing, text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Junze Yin

We consider the fundamental problem of ReLU regression, where the goal is to output the best fitting ReLU with respect to square loss given access to draws from some unknown distribution. We give the first efficient, constant-factor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Ilias Diakonikolas , Surbhi Goel , Sushrut Karmalkar , Adam R. Klivans , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

The softmax function is a widely used activation function in the output layers of neural networks, responsible for converting raw scores into class probabilities while introducing essential non-linearity. Implementing Softmax efficiently…

We analyze approximation rates of deep ReLU neural networks for Sobolev-regular functions with respect to weaker Sobolev norms. First, we construct, based on a calculus of ReLU networks, artificial neural networks with ReLU activation…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2019-02-22 Ingo Gühring , Gitta Kutyniok , Philipp Petersen

The attention mechanism is a pivotal element within the transformer architecture, making a substantial contribution to its exceptional performance. Within this attention mechanism, Softmax is an imperative component that enables the model…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Tianhua Xia , Sai Qian Zhang

Function approximation is a powerful approach for structuring large decision problems that has facilitated great achievements in the areas of reinforcement learning and game playing. Regression counterfactual regret minimization (RCFR) is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-04 Ryan D'Orazio , Dustin Morrill , James R. Wright , Michael Bowling

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Incremental processing allows interactive systems to respond based on partial inputs, which is a desirable property e.g. in dialogue agents. The currently popular Transformer architecture inherently processes sequences as a whole,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Patrick Kahardipraja , Brielen Madureira , David Schlangen

We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Quan Nguyen , Thanh Nguyen-Tang

LLMs demonstrate significant inference capacities in complicated machine learning tasks, using the Transformer model as its backbone. Motivated by the limited understanding of such models on the unsupervised learning problems, we study the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Yihan He , Hong-Yu Chen , Yuan Cao , Jianqing Fan , Han Liu