Related papers: How Many Different Outputs Can a Transformer Gener…
Scaling sequence length has become a critical demand in the era of large language models. However, existing methods struggle with either computational complexity or model expressivity, rendering the maximum sequence length restricted. To…
Despite the remarkable success of transformer architectures in natural language processing, their scalability limitations remain poorly understood through systematic empirical analysis. This paper presents the first comprehensive…
Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input's length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the…
The Transformer architecture is widely applied in sequence modeling applications, yet the theoretical understanding of its working principles remains limited. In this work, we investigate the approximation rate for single-layer Transformers…
The capacity of line networks with buffer size constraints is an open, but practically important problem. In this paper, the upper bound on the achievable rate of a class of codes, called batched codes, is studied for line networks. Batched…
Generative AI, in particular large transformer models, are increasingly driving HPC system design in science and industry. We analyze performance characteristics of such transformer models and discuss their sensitivity to the transformer…
The recent advances introduced by neural machine translation (NMT) are rapidly expanding the application fields of machine translation, as well as reshaping the quality level to be targeted. In particular, if translations have to fit some…
A major limitation for the broader scope of problems solvable by transformers is the quadratic scaling of computational complexity with input size. In this study, we investigate the recurrent memory augmentation of pre-trained transformer…
Transformers have been successfully applied to sequential, auto-regressive tasks despite being feedforward networks. Unlike recurrent neural networks, Transformers use attention to capture temporal relations while processing input tokens in…
Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer…
Frontier models can be prompted or conditioned to do many tasks, but finding good prompts is not always easy, nor is understanding some performant prompts. We view prompting as finding the best conditioning sequence on a near-optimal…
Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…
Mixture models arise in many regression problems, but most methods have seen limited adoption partly due to these algorithms' highly-tailored and model-specific nature. On the other hand, transformers are flexible, neural sequence models…
This paper performs the analysis necessary to bound the running time of known, efficient algorithms for generating all longest common subsequences. That is, we bound the running time as a function of input size for algorithms with time…
Since the success of GPT, large language models (LLMs) have been revolutionizing machine learning and have initiated the so-called LLM prompting paradigm. In the era of LLMs, people train a single general-purpose LLM and provide the LLM…
The limits of open-ended generative models are unclear, yet increasingly important. What causes them to succeed and what causes them to fail? In this paper, we take a prompt-centric approach to analyzing and bounding the abilities of…
Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally…
Transformers have become the foundational architecture for a broad spectrum of sequence modeling applications, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing, vision, and beyond. However, their theoretical limitations…
Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best…
Transformers have become pivotal in Natural Language Processing, demonstrating remarkable success in applications like Machine Translation and Summarization. Given their widespread adoption, several works have attempted to analyze the…