English
Related papers

Related papers: Focus and Dilution: The Multi-stage Learning Proce…

200 papers

Flow-based generative models have shown an excellent ability to explicitly learn the probability density function of data via a sequence of invertible transformations. Yet, learning attentions in generative flows remains understudied, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker , Zhiwu Huang , Suryansh Kumar , Radu Timofte , Luc Van Gool

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 models have emerged as fundamental tools across various scientific and engineering disciplines, owing to their outstanding performance in diverse applications. Despite this empirical success, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhen Qin , Jinxin Zhou , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

This paper identifies significant redundancy in the query-key interactions within self-attention mechanisms of diffusion transformer models, particularly during the early stages of denoising diffusion steps. In response to this observation,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Jiayi Guo , Dongchen Han , Qixiu Li , Duo Li , Yuhui Yuan , Ji Li , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang , Xiu Li

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Gerard Sant , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Marta R. Costa-Jussà

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

Advances in language modeling have led to the development of deep attention-based models that are performant across a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) problems. These language models are typified by a pre-training process…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Joseph F DeRose , Jiayao Wang , Matthew Berger

Continual learning (CL) empowers AI systems to progressively acquire knowledge from non-stationary data streams. However, catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge. In this work, we identify attention drift in Vision Transformers…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yue Lu , Xiangyu Zhou , Shizhou Zhang , Yinghui Xing , Guoqiang Liang , Wencong Zhang

Attention-based transformers have achieved tremendous success across a variety of disciplines including natural languages. To deepen our understanding of their sequential modeling capabilities, there is a growing interest in using Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Ashok Vardhan Makkuva , Marco Bondaschi , Adway Girish , Alliot Nagle , Martin Jaggi , Hyeji Kim , Michael Gastpar

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pengcheng Huang , Tianming Liu , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Tong Xiao , Zulong Chen , Maosong Sun

Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Chong Li , Shaonan Wang , Yunhao Zhang , Jiajun Zhang , Chengqing Zong

Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hung-Hsuan Chen

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann

Transformers are extremely successful machine learning models whose mathematical properties remain poorly understood. Here, we rigorously characterize the behavior of transformers with hardmax self-attention and normalization sublayers as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Albert Alcalde , Giovanni Fantuzzi , Enrique Zuazua

Transformers empirically perform precise probabilistic reasoning in carefully constructed ``Bayesian wind tunnels'' and in large-scale language models, yet the mechanisms by which gradient-based learning creates the required internal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Naman Agarwal , Siddhartha R. Dalal , Vishal Misra

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Explainability for Deep Learning Models is especially important for clinical applications, where decisions of automated systems have far-reaching consequences. While various post-hoc explainable methods, such as attention visualization and…

Sampling from learned high-dimensional distributions is a foundational computational problem. We introduce U-turn chains: Markov chains obtained by iterating short forward-backward steps of a diffusion model, in which each step proposes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Hyunmo Kang , Noam Itzhak Levi , Corinna Elena Wegner , Daniel J. Korchinski , Matthieu Wyart

Modern language models rely on the transformer architecture and attention mechanism to perform language understanding and text generation. In this work, we study learning a 1-layer self-attention model from a set of prompts and associated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 M. Emrullah Ildiz , Yixiao Huang , Yingcong Li , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Francesco D'Angelo , Nicolas Flammarion