arXiv AI

How Much Information Can We Fit inside a Transformer?

arXiv:2610. 34553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How efficiently can transformers store factual knowledge?

arXiv AI
2d ago

Quantitative Generalization Bounds for Multi-Layer Transformers: A Few Long Strings can Beat Many Short Ones

The paper presents quantitative generalization bounds for fixed‑precision transformer models, addressing both in‑distribution statistical generalization and length generalization. It derives guarantees based on model parameters, quantization space, and alphabet size, and shows how training length and sample size trade off, with longer training being exponentially more efficient. Experiments confirm the theoretical predictions.

By Marius Henry, Michael Rizvi-Martel, Michael Hahn
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Performance-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Transformers: An Approximation Theory Perspective

The paper examines how to allocate attention heads and head dimensions across Transformer layers to balance expressivity and efficiency. It provides a mathematical analysis of early layers’ role in information extraction and characterizes the trade‑off between head count and dimension under a fixed parameter budget. The authors prove a saturation effect of softmax activations, showing that increasing head dimensions yields diminishing returns, especially for long sequences, and propose strategies for efficient parameter allocation across layers.

By Ruoxi Yu, Haotian Jiang, Jingpu Cheng, Penghao Yu, Qianxiao Li, Zhong Li
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Putting Transformer Theories to the Test

arXiv:2610.32104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several formal theories have been developed to characterize the capabilities and limitations of the transformer architecture, each employing differen...

By Awni Altabaa, Tobias Schnabel, Kiran Tomlinson
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Length Generalization for Transformers via Compression

arXiv:2609.08851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in transformer length generalization theory enable us to reliably predict when a transformer can learn to solve a task. In particul...

By Georg Zetzsche, Hongjian Jiang, Andy Yang, Pascal Bergstr\"a{\ss}er, Marco S\"alzer, David Chiang, Anthony W. Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

From Scaling to Structured Expressivity: Rethinking Transformers for CTR Prediction

arXiv:2511. 12081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite massive investments in scale, deep models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction often exhibit rapidly diminishing returns -- a stark contrast to the {predictable scaling laws} seen in large language models (LLMs).

By Bencheng Yan, Yuejie Lei, Zhiyuan Zeng, Zheye Deng, Di Wang, Kaiyi Lin, Pengjie Wang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

How Many Different Outputs Can a Transformer Generate?

arXiv:2605. 22223v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how we can leverage only a handful of characteristics of a transformer's architecture to closely predict the number of different sequences it can output, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

By Maxime Meyer, Mario Michelessa, Caroline Chaux, Vincent Y. F. Tan