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Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…
Attention layers -- which map a sequence of inputs to a sequence of outputs -- are core building blocks of the Transformer architecture which has achieved significant breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a…
We study the hardmax limit of self-attention dynamics for token embeddings obtained in the zero-temperature ($\beta\to+\infty$) regime, and relate it to the finite-$\beta$ setting. In this limit, the update rule can be viewed as a…
Contemporary diffusion models built upon U-Net or Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures have revolutionized image generation through transformer-based attention mechanisms. The prevailing paradigm has commonly employed self-attention…
In this work, we study how multi-head latent attention (MLA), a popular strategy for compressing key/value memory, affects a transformer's internal capacity during pretraining. Using a lightweight suite of Marchenko-Pastur (MP) diagnostics,…
The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…
The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…
The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…
The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…
Transformer-based language models are trained on large datasets to predict the next token given an input sequence. Despite this simple training objective, they have led to revolutionary advances in natural language processing. Underlying…
Transformers often display an attention sink: probability mass concentrates on a fixed, content-agnostic position. Are sinks a byproduct of the optimization/training regime? Or are they sometimes functionally necessary in softmax…
The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers…
In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…
Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to Large Language Models. In generative Transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, GPU-stored…
In both Computer Vision and the wider Deep Learning field, the Transformer architecture is well-established as state-of-the-art for many applications. For Multitask Learning, however, where there may be many more queries necessary compared…
One of the challenges for Tiny Machine Learning (tinyML) is keeping up with the evolution of Machine Learning models from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers. We address this by leveraging a heterogeneous architectural template…
Attention-based Transformers have demonstrated strong adaptability across a wide range of tasks and have become the backbone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their underlying mechanisms remain open for further exploration.…
The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…
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…
Despite the significant progress made by transformer models in machine reading comprehension tasks, they still fall short in handling complex reasoning tasks due to the absence of explicit knowledge in the input sequence. To address this…