Related papers: Transformer Approximations from ReLUs
This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…
Transformer-based models are the state-of-the-art for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) applications. Models are getting bigger and better on various tasks. However, Transformer models remain computationally challenging since they are…
Transformers are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…
Despite achieving state-of-the-art results in nearly all Natural Language Processing applications, fine-tuning Transformer-based language models still requires a significant amount of labeled data to work. A well known technique to reduce…
Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for visual perception tasks. The self-attention mechanism underpinning the strength of ViTs has a quadratic complexity in both computation and memory usage. This motivates the…
Transformer is a powerful tool for many natural language tasks which is based on self-attention, a mechanism that encodes the dependence of other tokens on each specific token, but the computation of self-attention is a bottleneck due to…
We introduce Performers, Transformer architectures which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on…
The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…
ReLU is widely seen as the default choice for activation functions in neural networks. However, there are cases where more complicated functions are required. In particular, recurrent neural networks (such as LSTMs) make extensive use of…
Softmax is widely used in deep learning to map some representation to a probability distribution. As it is based on exp/log functions that are relatively expensive in multi-party computation, Mohassel and Zhang (2017) proposed a simpler…
Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…
Deriving formal bounds on the expressivity of transformers, as well as studying transformers that are constructed to implement known algorithms, are both effective methods for better understanding the computational power of transformers.…
Previous work on the learnability of transformers \textemdash\ focused primarily on examining their ability to approximate specific algorithmic patterns through training \textemdash\ has largely been data-driven, offering only probabilistic…
The softmax representation of probabilities for categorical variables plays a prominent role in modern machine learning with numerous applications in areas such as large scale classification, neural language modeling and recommendation…
Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…
Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax…
Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their use for numerical computation has received less attention. We study the approximation of matrix functions, which map scalar functions to matrices, using neural networks…
Recently, Transformer networks have demonstrated outstanding performance in the field of image restoration due to the global receptive field and adaptability to input. However, the quadratic computational complexity of Softmax-attention…
We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…
Real-time personalization has advanced significantly in recent years, with platforms utilizing machine learning models to predict user preferences based on rich behavioral data on each individual user. Traditional approaches usually rely on…