arXiv:2602. 19143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies simple transformers trained on a high-order Markov chain, where the model must incorporate information from multiple past positions, each with different statistical importance.
By O\u{g}uz Kaan Y\"uksel, Rodrigo Alvarez Lucendo, Nicolas Flammarion
arXiv:2603. 03993v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-head attention enables transformer models to represent multiple attention patterns simultaneously.
By M. Sagitova, O. Duranthon, L. Zdeborov\'a
arXiv:2512. 11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis.
By Etienne Boursier, Claire Boyer
arXiv:2606. 25010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural scaling laws for transformer language models predict smooth improvements in pretraining loss with increasing parameters, but downstream capabilities such as in-context learning are known to emerge abruptly past a certain model scale.
By Vatsal Baherwani, Zixi Chen, Shikai Qiu, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Pavel Izmailov
arXiv:2608. 09558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How expressive is prompting a transformer?
By Alexander Hsu, Rongjie Lai
arXiv:2501. 18322v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens.
By Val\'erie Castin, Pierre Ablin, Jos\'e Antonio Carrillo, Gabriel Peyr\'e
arXiv:2508. 17821v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms.
By Timur Mudarisov, Mikhail Burtsev, Tatiana Petrova, Radu State
arXiv:2510. 05554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models scale to longer contexts, attention layers suffer from a fundamental pathology: attention scores collapse toward uniformity as context length $n$ increases, causing tokens to cluster excessively, a phenomenon known as rank-collapse.
By Shi Chen, Zhengjiang Lin, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet
arXiv:2410. 24050v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale pretraining of transformers has been central to the success of foundation models.
By Ambroise Odonnat, Wassim Bouaziz, Vivien Cabannes
arXiv:2606. 14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties.
By Chenxiang Zhang, Rustem Islamov, Enea Monzio Compagnoni, Jun Pang, Aurelien Lucchi, Antonio Orvieto
arXiv:2606. 22406v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Attention mechanisms have demonstrated remarkable empirical success in identifying relevant information from large collections of tokens, yet the theoretical principles underlying this behavior remain poorly understood.
By Lan V. Truong
arXiv:2607. 02800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Induction heads are attention circuits believed to underlie in-context learning in transformers, yet a precise characterization of the estimators they implement remains elusive.
By Francesco D'Angelo, Oguz Kaan Yuksel, Swathi Shree Narashiman, Nicolas Flammarion