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While next-token prediction (NTP) has been the standard objective for training language models, it often struggles to capture global structure in reasoning tasks. Multi-token prediction (MTP) has recently emerged as a promising alternative,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jianhao Huang , Zhanpeng Zhou , Renqiu Xia , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Weijie Su , Wei Huang

Self-attention in Transformers is typically implemented as $\mathrm{softmax}(QK^\top/\sqrt{d})V$, where $Q=XW_Q$, $K=XW_K$, and $V=XW_V$ are learned linear projections of the input $X$. We ask whether these learned projections are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Debarshi Kundu , Archisman Ghosh , Swaroop Ghosh , Vasant Honavar

Transformer-based pre-trained models with millions of parameters require large storage. Recent approaches tackle this shortcoming by training adapters, but these approaches still require a relatively large number of parameters. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Chin-Lun Fu , Zih-Ching Chen , Yun-Ru Lee , Hung-yi Lee

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

Attention-based Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and shown strong performance in computer vision (CV) tasks. However, as the input sequence varies, the computational bottlenecks in Transformer models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Huizheng Wang , Hongbin Wang , Shaojun Wei , Yang Hu , Shouyi Yin

Long-context large language models (LLMs) face constraints due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. The mainstream sequence parallelism (SP) method, Ring Attention, attempts to solve this by distributing the query…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yida Wang , Ke Hong , Xiuhong Li , Yuanchao Xu , Wenxun Wang , Guohao Dai , Yu Wang

We propose a variational quantum implementation of self-attention (QSA), the core operation in transformers and large language models, which predicts future elements of a sequence by forming overlap-weighted combinations of past data. At…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-09 Alessio Pecilli , Matteo Rosati

Transformer language models have driven significant progress across various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. A central component of these models is the self-attention (SA) mechanism, which learns rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Suvadeep Hajra

Attention mechanisms underpin the success of large language models (LLMs), yet their substantial computational and memory overhead poses challenges for optimizing efficiency and performance. A critical bottleneck arises as KV cache and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Luoyang Sun , Cheng Deng , Jiwen Jiang , Xinjian Wu , Haifeng Zhang , Lei Chen , Lionel Ni , Jun Wang

Transformers lack an explicit architectural mechanism for storing and organizing knowledge acquired during training. We introduce learnable sparse memory banks: a set of latent tokens, randomly initialized and trained end-to-end, that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tasmay Pankaj Tibrewal , Pritish Saha , Ankit Meda , Kunal Singh , Pradeep Moturi

Transformers achieve state-of-the-art results across many tasks, but their uniform application of quadratic self-attention to every token at every layer makes them computationally expensive. We introduce DTRNet (Dynamic Token Routing…

While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

Despite the popularity of transformers in practice, their architectures are empirically designed and neither mathematically justified nor interpretable. Moreover, as indicated by many empirical studies, some components of transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Peng Wang , Yifu Lu , Yaodong Yu , Druv Pai , Qing Qu , Yi Ma

Sub-token routing provides a finer compression axis for transformer efficiency than the coarse units used in most prior work, such as tokens, pages, heads, or layers. In this paper, we study routing within a token representation itself in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Wei Jiang , Wei Wang

Transformer-based language models display impressive reasoning-like behavior, yet remain brittle on tasks that require stable symbolic manipulation. This paper develops a unified perspective on these phenomena by interpreting self-attention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

Transformers evaluated in a single, fixed-depth pass are provably limited in expressive power to the constant-depth circuit class TC0. Running a Transformer autoregressively removes that ceiling -- first in next-token prediction and, more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Mrinal Mathur , Mike Doan , Barak Pearlmutter , Sergey Plis

Self-attention is usually described as a flexible, content-adaptive way to mix a token with information from its past. We reinterpret causal self-attention transformers, the backbone of modern foundation models, within a probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Deepak Agarwal , Dhyey Dharmendrakumar Mavani , Suyash Gupta , Karthik Sethuraman , Tejas Dharamsi

Standard inference and training with transformer based architectures scale quadratically with input sequence length. This is prohibitively large for a variety of applications especially in web-page translation, query-answering etc.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Lovish Madaan , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Himanshu Jain , Prateek Jain

The transformer architecture has prevailed in various deep learning settings due to its exceptional capabilities to select and compose structural information. Motivated by these capabilities, Sanford et al. proposed the sparse token…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-12 Zixuan Wang , Stanley Wei , Daniel Hsu , Jason D. Lee