arXiv AI

Individual Parameters in Weight-Sparse Transformers Appear Interpretable

arXiv:2607. 02964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does.

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