arXiv Machine Learning

Importance Scoring of Transformer Attention Heads in Learning Tabular Data

The paper introduces an importance‑scoring metric for multi‑head transformer attention heads applied to tabular data, a domain where transformers have been less studied. Experiments on 40 diverse tabular datasets show that removing heads with the lowest importance scores has minimal impact on performance, while removing the most important head first causes the largest drop. The study finds that important heads are distributed across layers and vary significantly across different tabular schemas, suggesting that the proposed score can help reduce redundancy and improve transformer efficiency.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Semantic Head Specialization Guides Hybrid ViT Attention for Multimodal LLMs

The paper introduces Semantic Head Specialization (SHS), a phenomenon where Vision Transformer (ViT) attention heads specialize as either object- or background-focused, most evident under full attention. It proposes the SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, demonstrating its ability to distinguish full-attention from chunk-window ViTs and its strong correlation with downstream benchmark performance. Leveraging insights into window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation, the authors design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid attention mechanism that matches full-attention performance on 22 image and video tasks while reducing attention compute by 6.5×.

By Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li, Hanglong Lv, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tong Yang, Shuhuai Ren
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

Attention Sink in Transformers: A Survey on Utilization, Interpretation, and Mitigation

arXiv:2604. 10098v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the foundational architecture of modern machine learning, Transformers have driven remarkable progress across diverse AI domains.

By Zunhai Su, Hengyuan Zhang, Wei Wu, Yifan Zhang, Yaxiu Liu, He Xiao, Qingyao Yang, Yuxuan Sun, Rui Yang, Chao Zhang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Keyu Fan, Weihao Ye, Chaofan Tao, Taiqiang Wu, Zhongwei Wan, Tiantian Zhang, Bowen Yan, Zhen Li, Yiming Zhang, Congkai Xie, Yulei Qian, Yuchen Xie, Yik-Chung Wu, Hongxia Yang, Ngai Wong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Generalized Context in Cross Attention for Transfer Learning of Disjoint Tabular Data

The paper introduces CATTLE, a transfer learning framework for disjoint tabular datasets that eliminates the need for shared features by leveraging generalized context learned through transformer projection weights. By using key, value, and query weights from source and target domains, CATTLE performs cross‑domain attention transfer in a data‑agnostic manner. Experiments on ten source‑target pairs demonstrate that CATTLE outperforms nine state‑of‑the‑art baselines, achieving the best average rank (2.9) and a 3.7% AUROC improvement.

By Kazi F. Akhter, Ibna Kowsar, Manar D. Samad