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Transformer-based models have become ubiquitous in natural language processing thanks to their large capacity, innate parallelism and high performance. The contextualizing component of a Transformer block is the $\textit{pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

Unneeded elements in the attention's context degrade performance. We introduce Selective Attention, a simple parameter-free change to the standard attention mechanism which reduces attention to unneeded elements. Selective attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

We propose a generalization of transformer neural network architecture for arbitrary graphs. The original transformer was designed for Natural Language Processing (NLP), which operates on fully connected graphs representing all connections…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Vijay Prakash Dwivedi , Xavier Bresson

Attention is an increasingly popular mechanism used in a wide range of neural architectures. The mechanism itself has been realized in a variety of formats. However, because of the fast-paced advances in this domain, a systematic overview…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Andrea Galassi , Marco Lippi , Paolo Torroni

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Transformer-based pre-trained models have gained much advance in recent years, becoming one of the most important backbones in natural language processing. Recent work shows that the attention mechanism inside Transformer may not be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Yile Wang , Linyi Yang , Zhiyang Teng , Ming Zhou , Yue Zhang

We argue that Transformers are essentially graph-to-graph models, with sequences just being a special case. Attention weights are functionally equivalent to graph edges. Our Graph-to-Graph Transformer architecture makes this ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-30 James Henderson , Alireza Mohammadshahi , Andrei C. Coman , Lesly Miculicich

Dynamic graph learning plays a pivotal role in modeling evolving relationships over time, especially for temporal link prediction tasks in domains such as traffic systems, social networks, and recommendation platforms. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Tao Zou , Chengfeng Wu , Tianxi Liao , Junchen Ye , Bowen Du

While attention has been empirically shown to improve model performance, it lacks a rigorous mathematical justification. This short paper establishes a novel connection between attention mechanisms and multinomial regression. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr

Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Dustin Wang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Steven Abreu , Yong Shan , Taylor Kergan , Yuqi Pan , Yuhong Chou , Zheng Li , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Jason Eshraghian

Time series forecasting is essential for many practical applications, with the adoption of transformer-based models on the rise due to their impressive performance in NLP and CV. Transformers' key feature, the attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 PeiSong Niu , Tian Zhou , Xue Wang , Liang Sun , Rong Jin

Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai

Transformers have emerged as a powerful neural network architecture capable of tackling a wide range of learning tasks. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of their ability to automatically extract structure from data in an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Pierre Marion , Claire Boyer

Transformers serve as the foundation of most modern large language models. To mitigate the quadratic complexity of standard full attention, various efficient attention mechanisms, such as linear and hybrid attention, have been developed. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xiaowei Ye , Xiaoyu He , Chao Liao , Chen Wu , Pinyan Lu

Attention is a key component of Transformers, which have recently achieved considerable success in natural language processing. Hence, attention is being extensively studied to investigate various linguistic capabilities of Transformers,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Mingze Wang , Weinan E

We present a Transformer architecture for long-context language modeling that combines global attention with two biologically inspired components: chunked local attention and a gated FIFO memory mechanism. This unified attention block…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Ankit Kashyap

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang