Daily Papers

Existing diffusion-based video editing models have made gorgeous advances for editing attributes of a source video over time but struggle to manipulate the motion information while preserving the original protagonist's appearance and background. To address this, we propose MotionEditor, a diffusion model for video motion editing. MotionEditor incorporates a novel content-aware motion adapter into ControlNet to capture temporal motion correspondence. While ControlNet enables direct generation based on skeleton poses, it encounters challenges when modifying the source motion in the inverted noise due to contradictory signals between the noise (source) and the condition (reference). Our adapter complements ControlNet by involving source content to transfer adapted control signals seamlessly. Further, we build up a two-branch architecture (a reconstruction branch and an editing branch) with a high-fidelity attention injection mechanism facilitating branch interaction. This mechanism enables the editing branch to query the key and value from the reconstruction branch in a decoupled manner, making the editing branch retain the original background and protagonist appearance. We also propose a skeleton alignment algorithm to address the discrepancies in pose size and position. Experiments demonstrate the promising motion editing ability of MotionEditor, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Audio-driven portrait animation, which synthesizes realistic videos from reference images using audio signals, faces significant challenges in real-time generation of high-fidelity, temporally coherent animations. While recent diffusion-based methods improve generation quality by integrating audio into denoising processes, their reliance on frame-by-frame UNet architectures introduces prohibitive latency and struggles with temporal consistency. This paper introduces MirrorMe, a real-time, controllable framework built on the LTX video model, a diffusion transformer that compresses video spatially and temporally for efficient latent space denoising. To address LTX's trade-offs between compression and semantic fidelity, we propose three innovations: 1. A reference identity injection mechanism via VAE-encoded image concatenation and self-attention, ensuring identity consistency; 2. A causal audio encoder and adapter tailored to LTX's temporal structure, enabling precise audio-expression synchronization; and 3. A progressive training strategy combining close-up facial training, half-body synthesis with facial masking, and hand pose integration for enhanced gesture control. Extensive experiments on the EMTD Benchmark demonstrate MirrorMe's state-of-the-art performance in fidelity, lip-sync accuracy, and temporal stability.

Customized video generation aims to produce videos featuring specific subjects under flexible user-defined conditions, yet existing methods often struggle with identity consistency and limited input modalities. In this paper, we propose HunyuanCustom, a multi-modal customized video generation framework that emphasizes subject consistency while supporting image, audio, video, and text conditions. Built upon HunyuanVideo, our model first addresses the image-text conditioned generation task by introducing a text-image fusion module based on LLaVA for enhanced multi-modal understanding, along with an image ID enhancement module that leverages temporal concatenation to reinforce identity features across frames. To enable audio- and video-conditioned generation, we further propose modality-specific condition injection mechanisms: an AudioNet module that achieves hierarchical alignment via spatial cross-attention, and a video-driven injection module that integrates latent-compressed conditional video through a patchify-based feature-alignment network. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-subject scenarios demonstrate that HunyuanCustom significantly outperforms state-of-the-art open- and closed-source methods in terms of ID consistency, realism, and text-video alignment. Moreover, we validate its robustness across downstream tasks, including audio and video-driven customized video generation. Our results highlight the effectiveness of multi-modal conditioning and identity-preserving strategies in advancing controllable video generation. All the code and models are available at https://hunyuancustom.github.io.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains but remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious inputs manipulate the model into ignoring original instructions and executing designated action. In this paper, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of these attacks by analyzing the attention patterns within LLMs. We introduce the concept of the distraction effect, where specific attention heads, termed important heads, shift focus from the original instruction to the injected instruction. Building on this discovery, we propose Attention Tracker, a training-free detection method that tracks attention patterns on instruction to detect prompt injection attacks without the need for additional LLM inference. Our method generalizes effectively across diverse models, datasets, and attack types, showing an AUROC improvement of up to 10.0% over existing methods, and performs well even on small LLMs. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach through extensive evaluations and provide insights into safeguarding LLM-integrated systems from prompt injection vulnerabilities.

Despite the impressive generative capabilities of diffusion models, existing diffusion model-based style transfer methods require inference-stage optimization (e.g. fine-tuning or textual inversion of style) which is time-consuming, or fails to leverage the generative ability of large-scale diffusion models. To address these issues, we introduce a novel artistic style transfer method based on a pre-trained large-scale diffusion model without any optimization. Specifically, we manipulate the features of self-attention layers as the way the cross-attention mechanism works; in the generation process, substituting the key and value of content with those of style image. This approach provides several desirable characteristics for style transfer including 1) preservation of content by transferring similar styles into similar image patches and 2) transfer of style based on similarity of local texture (e.g. edge) between content and style images. Furthermore, we introduce query preservation and attention temperature scaling to mitigate the issue of disruption of original content, and initial latent Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) to deal with the disharmonious color (failure to transfer the colors of style). Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both conventional and diffusion-based style transfer baselines.

Recent Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been challenged by the computational overhead resulting from massive video frames, often alleviated through compression strategies. However, the visual content is not equally contributed to user instructions, existing strategies (\eg, average pool) inevitably lead to the loss of potentially useful information. To tackle this, we propose the Hybrid-level Instruction Injection Strategy for Conditional Token Compression in MLLMs (HICom), utilizing the instruction as a condition to guide the compression from both local and global levels. This encourages the compression to retain the maximum amount of user-focused information while reducing visual tokens to minimize computational burden. Specifically, the instruction condition is injected into the grouped visual tokens at the local level and the learnable tokens at the global level, and we conduct the attention mechanism to complete the conditional compression. From the hybrid-level compression, the instruction-relevant visual parts are highlighted while the temporal-spatial structure is also preserved for easier understanding of LLMs. To further unleash the potential of HICom, we introduce a new conditional pre-training stage with our proposed dataset HICom-248K. Experiments show that our HICom can obtain distinguished video understanding ability with fewer tokens, increasing the performance by 2.43\% average on three multiple-choice QA benchmarks and saving 78.8\% tokens compared with the SOTA method. The code is available at https://github.com/lntzm/HICom.

While image-based virtual try-on has made significant strides, emerging approaches still fall short of delivering high-fidelity and robust fitting images across various scenarios, as their models suffer from issues of ill-fitted garment styles and quality degrading during the training process, not to mention the lack of support for various combinations of attire. Therefore, we first propose a lightweight, scalable, operator known as Hydra Block for attire combinations. This is achieved through a parallel attention mechanism that facilitates the feature injection of multiple garments from conditionally encoded branches into the main network. Secondly, to significantly enhance the model's robustness and expressiveness in real-world scenarios, we evolve its potential across diverse settings by synthesizing the residuals of multiple models, as well as implementing a mask region boost strategy to overcome the instability caused by information leakage in existing models. Equipped with the above design, AnyFit surpasses all baselines on high-resolution benchmarks and real-world data by a large gap, excelling in producing well-fitting garments replete with photorealistic and rich details. Furthermore, AnyFit's impressive performance on high-fidelity virtual try-ons in any scenario from any image, paves a new path for future research within the fashion community.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

Customization generation techniques have significantly advanced the synthesis of specific concepts across varied contexts. Multi-concept customization emerges as the challenging task within this domain. Existing approaches often rely on training a fusion matrix of multiple Low-Rank Adaptations (LoRAs) to merge various concepts into a single image. However, we identify this straightforward method faces two major challenges: 1) concept confusion, where the model struggles to preserve distinct individual characteristics, and 2) concept vanishing, where the model fails to generate the intended subjects. To address these issues, we introduce LoRA-Composer, a training-free framework designed for seamlessly integrating multiple LoRAs, thereby enhancing the harmony among different concepts within generated images. LoRA-Composer addresses concept vanishing through concept injection constraints, enhancing concept visibility via an expanded cross-attention mechanism. To combat concept confusion, concept isolation constraints are introduced, refining the self-attention computation. Furthermore, latent re-initialization is proposed to effectively stimulate concept-specific latent within designated regions. Our extensive testing showcases a notable enhancement in LoRA-Composer's performance compared to standard baselines, especially when eliminating the image-based conditions like canny edge or pose estimations. Code is released at https://github.com/Young98CN/LoRA_Composer

Reference-based sketch colorization methods have garnered significant attention due to their potential applications in the animation production industry. However, most existing methods are trained with image triplets of sketch, reference, and ground truth that are semantically and spatially well-aligned, while real-world references and sketches often exhibit substantial misalignment. This mismatch in data distribution between training and inference leads to overfitting, consequently resulting in spatial artifacts and significant degradation in overall colorization quality, limiting potential applications of current methods for general purposes. To address this limitation, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the carrier, defined as the latent representation facilitating information transfer from reference to sketch. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel workflow that dynamically adapts the carrier to optimize distinct aspects of colorization. Specifically, for spatially misaligned artifacts, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with spatial masks, enabling region-specific reference injection within the diffusion process. To mitigate semantic neglect of sketches, we employ dedicated background and style encoders to transfer detailed reference information in the latent feature space, achieving enhanced spatial control and richer detail synthesis. Furthermore, we propose character-mask merging and background bleaching as preprocessing steps to improve foreground-background integration and background generation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, including a user study, demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to existing approaches. An ablation study further validates the efficacy of each proposed component.

Transformers for graph data are increasingly widely studied and successful in numerous learning tasks. Graph inductive biases are crucial for Graph Transformers, and previous works incorporate them using message-passing modules and/or positional encodings. However, Graph Transformers that use message-passing inherit known issues of message-passing, and differ significantly from Transformers used in other domains, thus making transfer of research advances more difficult. On the other hand, Graph Transformers without message-passing often perform poorly on smaller datasets, where inductive biases are more crucial. To bridge this gap, we propose the Graph Inductive bias Transformer (GRIT) -- a new Graph Transformer that incorporates graph inductive biases without using message passing. GRIT is based on several architectural changes that are each theoretically and empirically justified, including: learned relative positional encodings initialized with random walk probabilities, a flexible attention mechanism that updates node and node-pair representations, and injection of degree information in each layer. We prove that GRIT is expressive -- it can express shortest path distances and various graph propagation matrices. GRIT achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance across a variety of graph datasets, thus showing the power that Graph Transformers without message-passing can deliver.

Balancing fidelity and editability is essential in text-based image editing (TIE), where failures commonly lead to over- or under-editing issues. Existing methods typically rely on attention injections for structure preservation and leverage the inherent text alignment capabilities of pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models for editability, but they lack explicit and unified mechanisms to properly balance these two objectives. In this work, we introduce UnifyEdit, a tuning-free method that performs diffusion latent optimization to enable a balanced integration of fidelity and editability within a unified framework. Unlike direct attention injections, we develop two attention-based constraints: a self-attention (SA) preservation constraint for structural fidelity, and a cross-attention (CA) alignment constraint to enhance text alignment for improved editability. However, simultaneously applying both constraints can lead to gradient conflicts, where the dominance of one constraint results in over- or under-editing. To address this challenge, we introduce an adaptive time-step scheduler that dynamically adjusts the influence of these constraints, guiding the diffusion latent toward an optimal balance. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its superiority in achieving a robust balance between structure preservation and text alignment across various editing tasks, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/CUC-MIPG/UnifyEdit.

Current text-to-image (T2I) generation models struggle to align spatial composition with the input text, especially in complex scenes. Even layout-based approaches yield suboptimal spatial control, as their generation process is decoupled from layout planning, making it difficult to refine the layout during synthesis. We present CoT-Diff, a framework that brings step-by-step CoT-style reasoning into T2I generation by tightly integrating Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-driven 3D layout planning with the diffusion process. CoT-Diff enables layout-aware reasoning inline within a single diffusion round: at each denoising step, the MLLM evaluates intermediate predictions, dynamically updates the 3D scene layout, and continuously guides the generation process. The updated layout is converted into semantic conditions and depth maps, which are fused into the diffusion model via a condition-aware attention mechanism, enabling precise spatial control and semantic injection. Experiments on 3D Scene benchmarks show that CoT-Diff significantly improves spatial alignment and compositional fidelity, and outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 34.7% in complex scene spatial accuracy, thereby validating the effectiveness of this entangled generation paradigm.

In a conversation or a dialogue process, attention and intention play intrinsic roles. This paper proposes a neural network based approach that models the attention and intention processes. It essentially consists of three recurrent networks. The encoder network is a word-level model representing source side sentences. The intention network is a recurrent network that models the dynamics of the intention process. The decoder network is a recurrent network produces responses to the input from the source side. It is a language model that is dependent on the intention and has an attention mechanism to attend to particular source side words, when predicting a symbol in the response. The model is trained end-to-end without labeling data. Experiments show that this model generates natural responses to user inputs.

The current large language models are mainly based on decode-only structure transformers, which have great in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. It is generally believed that the important foundation of its ICL capability is the induction heads mechanism, which requires at least two layers attention. In order to more efficiently implement the ability of the model's induction, we revisit the induction heads mechanism and proposed a KV shifting attention. We theoretically prove that the KV shifting attention reducing the model's requirements for the depth and width of the induction heads mechanism. Our experimental results demonstrate that KV shifting attention is beneficial to learning induction heads and language modeling, which lead to better performance or faster convergence from toy models to the pre-training models with more than 10 B parameters.

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving force behind many recent state-of-the-art NLP models such as Transformer-based MT models and BERT. These models apply multiple attention mechanisms in parallel, with each attention "head" potentially focusing on different parts of the input, which makes it possible to express sophisticated functions beyond the simple weighted average. In this paper we make the surprising observation that even if models have been trained using multiple heads, in practice, a large percentage of attention heads can be removed at test time without significantly impacting performance. In fact, some layers can even be reduced to a single head. We further examine greedy algorithms for pruning down models, and the potential speed, memory efficiency, and accuracy improvements obtainable therefrom. Finally, we analyze the results with respect to which parts of the model are more reliant on having multiple heads, and provide precursory evidence that training dynamics play a role in the gains provided by multi-head attention.

Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly useful both for providing insights to practitioners and for explaining why a model makes its decisions to stakeholders. We call the latter use of attention mechanisms into question by demonstrating a simple method for training models to produce deceptive attention masks. Our method diminishes the total weight assigned to designated impermissible tokens, even when the models can be shown to nevertheless rely on these features to drive predictions. Across multiple models and tasks, our approach manipulates attention weights while paying surprisingly little cost in accuracy. Through a human study, we show that our manipulated attention-based explanations deceive people into thinking that predictions from a model biased against gender minorities do not rely on the gender. Consequently, our results cast doubt on attention's reliability as a tool for auditing algorithms in the context of fairness and accountability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find that LLMs trained directly on large-scale data often capture spurious correlations rather than true causal relationships, leading to suboptimal performance, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose Causal Attention Tuning (CAT), a novel approach that injects fine-grained causal knowledge into the attention mechanism. We propose an automated pipeline that leverages human priors to automatically generate token-level causal signals and introduce the Re-Attention mechanism to guide training, helping the model focus on causal structures while mitigating noise and biases in attention scores. Experimental results on our proposed Spurious Token Game (STG) benchmark and multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively leverages causal knowledge for prediction and remains robust in OOD scenarios. Implementation details can be found at https://github.com/Kairong-Han/CAT.

Interpretability research aims to bridge the gap between empirical success and our scientific understanding of the inner workings of large language models (LLMs). However, most existing research focuses on analyzing a single mechanism, such as how models copy or recall factual knowledge. In this work, we propose a formulation of competition of mechanisms, which focuses on the interplay of multiple mechanisms instead of individual mechanisms and traces how one of them becomes dominant in the final prediction. We uncover how and where mechanisms compete within LLMs using two interpretability methods: logit inspection and attention modification. Our findings show traces of the mechanisms and their competition across various model components and reveal attention positions that effectively control the strength of certain mechanisms. Code: https://github.com/francescortu/comp-mech. Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/francescortu/comp-mech.

An attentional mechanism has lately been used to improve neural machine translation (NMT) by selectively focusing on parts of the source sentence during translation. However, there has been little work exploring useful architectures for attention-based NMT. This paper examines two simple and effective classes of attentional mechanism: a global approach which always attends to all source words and a local one that only looks at a subset of source words at a time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches over the WMT translation tasks between English and German in both directions. With local attention, we achieve a significant gain of 5.0 BLEU points over non-attentional systems which already incorporate known techniques such as dropout. Our ensemble model using different attention architectures has established a new state-of-the-art result in the WMT'15 English to German translation task with 25.9 BLEU points, an improvement of 1.0 BLEU points over the existing best system backed by NMT and an n-gram reranker.

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological models that try to capture its core properties. Recently attentional mechanisms have become a dominating architectural choice of machine learning and are the central innovation of Transformers. The dominant intuition and formalism underlying their development has drawn on ideas of keys and queries in database management systems. In this work, we propose an alternative Bayesian foundation for attentional mechanisms and show how this unifies different attentional architectures in machine learning. This formulation allows to to identify commonality across different attention ML architectures as well as suggest a bridge to those developed in neuroscience. We hope this work will guide more sophisticated intuitions into the key properties of attention architectures and suggest new ones.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks by conditioning on input-output examples in the prompt, without requiring any update in model parameters. While widely adopted, it remains unclear whether prompting with multiple examples is the most effective and efficient way to convey task information. In this work, we propose Soft Injection of task embeddings. The task embeddings are constructed only once using few-shot ICL prompts and repeatedly used during inference. Soft injection is performed by softly mixing task embeddings with attention head activations using pre-optimized mixing parameters, referred to as soft head-selection parameters. This method not only allows a desired task to be performed without in-prompt demonstrations but also significantly outperforms existing ICL approaches while reducing memory usage and compute cost at inference time. An extensive evaluation is performed across 57 tasks and 12 LLMs, spanning four model families of sizes from 4B to 70B. Averaged across 57 tasks, our method outperforms 10-shot ICL by 10.2%-14.3% across 12 LLMs. Additional analyses show that our method also serves as an insightful tool for analyzing task-relevant roles of attention heads, revealing that task-relevant head positions selected by our method transfer across similar tasks but not across dissimilar ones -- underscoring the task-specific nature of head functionality. Our soft injection method opens a new paradigm for reducing prompt length and improving task performance by shifting task conditioning from the prompt space to the activation space.

Sign languages are dynamic visual languages that involve hand gestures, in combination with non manual elements such as facial expressions. While video recordings of sign language are commonly used for education and documentation, the dynamic nature of signs can make it challenging to study them in detail, especially for new learners and educators. This work aims to convert sign language video footage into static illustrations, which serve as an additional educational resource to complement video content. This process is usually done by an artist, and is therefore quite costly. We propose a method that illustrates sign language videos by leveraging generative models' ability to understand both the semantic and geometric aspects of images. Our approach focuses on transferring a sketch like illustration style to video footage of sign language, combining the start and end frames of a sign into a single illustration, and using arrows to highlight the hand's direction and motion. While many style transfer methods address domain adaptation at varying levels of abstraction, applying a sketch like style to sign languages, especially for hand gestures and facial expressions, poses a significant challenge. To tackle this, we intervene in the denoising process of a diffusion model, injecting style as keys and values into high resolution attention layers, and fusing geometric information from the image and edges as queries. For the final illustration, we use the attention mechanism to combine the attention weights from both the start and end illustrations, resulting in a soft combination. Our method offers a cost effective solution for generating sign language illustrations at inference time, addressing the lack of such resources in educational materials.

Maintaining road pavement integrity is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient transportation. Conventional methods for assessing pavement condition are often laborious and susceptible to human error. This paper proposes YOLO9tr, a novel lightweight object detection model for pavement damage detection, leveraging the advancements of deep learning. YOLO9tr is based on the YOLOv9 architecture, incorporating a partial attention block that enhances feature extraction and attention mechanisms, leading to improved detection performance in complex scenarios. The model is trained on a comprehensive dataset comprising road damage images from multiple countries, including an expanded set of damage categories beyond the standard four. This broadened classification range allows for a more accurate and realistic assessment of pavement conditions. Comparative analysis demonstrates YOLO9tr's superior precision and inference speed compared to state-of-the-art models like YOLO8, YOLO9 and YOLO10, achieving a balance between computational efficiency and detection accuracy. The model achieves a high frame rate of up to 136 FPS, making it suitable for real-time applications such as video surveillance and automated inspection systems. The research presents an ablation study to analyze the impact of architectural modifications and hyperparameter variations on model performance, further validating the effectiveness of the partial attention block. The results highlight YOLO9tr's potential for practical deployment in real-time pavement condition monitoring, contributing to the development of robust and efficient solutions for maintaining safe and functional road infrastructure.

Adding Object into images based on text instructions is a challenging task in semantic image editing, requiring a balance between preserving the original scene and seamlessly integrating the new object in a fitting location. Despite extensive efforts, existing models often struggle with this balance, particularly with finding a natural location for adding an object in complex scenes. We introduce Add-it, a training-free approach that extends diffusion models' attention mechanisms to incorporate information from three key sources: the scene image, the text prompt, and the generated image itself. Our weighted extended-attention mechanism maintains structural consistency and fine details while ensuring natural object placement. Without task-specific fine-tuning, Add-it achieves state-of-the-art results on both real and generated image insertion benchmarks, including our newly constructed "Additing Affordance Benchmark" for evaluating object placement plausibility, outperforming supervised methods. Human evaluations show that Add-it is preferred in over 80% of cases, and it also demonstrates improvements in various automated metrics.

Existing text-driven motion generation methods often treat synthesis as a bidirectional mapping between language and motion, but remain limited in capturing the causal logic of action execution and the human intentions that drive behavior. The absence of visual grounding further restricts precision and personalization, as language alone cannot specify fine-grained spatiotemporal details. We propose MoGIC, a unified framework that integrates intention modeling and visual priors into multimodal motion synthesis. By jointly optimizing multimodal-conditioned motion generation and intention prediction, MoGIC uncovers latent human goals, leverages visual priors to enhance generation, and exhibits versatile multimodal generative capability. We further introduce a mixture-of-attention mechanism with adaptive scope to enable effective local alignment between conditional tokens and motion subsequences. To support this paradigm, we curate Mo440H, a 440-hour benchmark from 21 high-quality motion datasets. Experiments show that after finetuning, MoGIC reduces FID by 38.6\% on HumanML3D and 34.6\% on Mo440H, surpasses LLM-based methods in motion captioning with a lightweight text head, and further enables intention prediction and vision-conditioned generation, advancing controllable motion synthesis and intention understanding. The code is available at https://github.com/JunyuShi02/MoGIC

Modern large language models (LLMs) are inherently auto-regressive, requiring input to be serialized into flat sequences regardless of their structural dependencies. This serialization hinders the model's ability to leverage structural inductive biases, especially in tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning on data with native graph structures, where inter-segment dependencies are crucial. We introduce Graph-KV with the potential to overcome this limitation. Graph-KV leverages the KV-cache of text segments as condensed representations and governs their interaction through structural inductive biases. In this framework, 'target' segments selectively attend only to the KV-caches of their designated 'source' segments, rather than all preceding segments in a serialized sequence. This approach induces a graph-structured block mask, sparsifying attention and enabling a message-passing-like step within the LLM. Furthermore, strategically allocated positional encodings for source and target segments reduce positional bias and context window consumption. We evaluate Graph-KV across three scenarios: (1) seven RAG benchmarks spanning direct inference, multi-hop reasoning, and long-document understanding; (2) Arxiv-QA, a novel academic paper QA task with full-text scientific papers structured as citation ego-graphs; and (3) paper topic classification within a citation network. By effectively reducing positional bias and harnessing structural inductive biases, Graph-KV substantially outperforms baselines, including standard costly sequential encoding, across various settings. Code and the Graph-KV data are publicly available.

"Induction heads" are attention heads that implement a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. In this work, we present preliminary and indirect evidence for a hypothesis that induction heads might constitute the mechanism for the majority of all "in-context learning" in large transformer models (i.e. decreasing loss at increasing token indices). We find that induction heads develop at precisely the same point as a sudden sharp increase in in-context learning ability, visible as a bump in the training loss. We present six complementary lines of evidence, arguing that induction heads may be the mechanistic source of general in-context learning in transformer models of any size. For small attention-only models, we present strong, causal evidence; for larger models with MLPs, we present correlational evidence.

There are two major classes of natural language grammar -- the dependency grammar that models one-to-one correspondences between words and the constituency grammar that models the assembly of one or several corresponded words. While previous unsupervised parsing methods mostly focus on only inducing one class of grammars, we introduce a novel model, StructFormer, that can simultaneously induce dependency and constituency structure. To achieve this, we propose a new parsing framework that can jointly generate a constituency tree and dependency graph. Then we integrate the induced dependency relations into the transformer, in a differentiable manner, through a novel dependency-constrained self-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model can achieve strong results on unsupervised constituency parsing, unsupervised dependency parsing, and masked language modeling at the same time.

Recent studies show that Transformer has strong capability of building long-range dependencies, yet is incompetent in capturing high frequencies that predominantly convey local information. To tackle this issue, we present a novel and general-purpose Inception Transformer, or iFormer for short, that effectively learns comprehensive features with both high- and low-frequency information in visual data. Specifically, we design an Inception mixer to explicitly graft the advantages of convolution and max-pooling for capturing the high-frequency information to Transformers. Different from recent hybrid frameworks, the Inception mixer brings greater efficiency through a channel splitting mechanism to adopt parallel convolution/max-pooling path and self-attention path as high- and low-frequency mixers, while having the flexibility to model discriminative information scattered within a wide frequency range. Considering that bottom layers play more roles in capturing high-frequency details while top layers more in modeling low-frequency global information, we further introduce a frequency ramp structure, i.e. gradually decreasing the dimensions fed to the high-frequency mixer and increasing those to the low-frequency mixer, which can effectively trade-off high- and low-frequency components across different layers. We benchmark the iFormer on a series of vision tasks, and showcase that it achieves impressive performance on image classification, COCO detection and ADE20K segmentation. For example, our iFormer-S hits the top-1 accuracy of 83.4% on ImageNet-1K, much higher than DeiT-S by 3.6%, and even slightly better than much bigger model Swin-B (83.3%) with only 1/4 parameters and 1/3 FLOPs. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/sail-sg/iFormer.

Human attention modelling has proven, in recent years, to be particularly useful not only for understanding the cognitive processes underlying visual exploration, but also for providing support to artificial intelligence models that aim to solve problems in various domains, including image and video processing, vision-and-language applications, and language modelling. This survey offers a reasoned overview of recent efforts to integrate human attention mechanisms into contemporary deep learning models and discusses future research directions and challenges. For a comprehensive overview on the ongoing research refer to our dedicated repository available at https://github.com/aimagelab/awesome-human-visual-attention.

Dot-product attention has wide applications in computer vision and natural language processing. However, its memory and computational costs grow quadratically with the input size. Such growth prohibits its application on high-resolution inputs. To remedy this drawback, this paper proposes a novel efficient attention mechanism equivalent to dot-product attention but with substantially less memory and computational costs. Its resource efficiency allows more widespread and flexible integration of attention modules into a network, which leads to better accuracies. Empirical evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of its advantages. Efficient attention modules brought significant performance boosts to object detectors and instance segmenters on MS-COCO 2017. Further, the resource efficiency democratizes attention to complex models, where high costs prohibit the use of dot-product attention. As an exemplar, a model with efficient attention achieved state-of-the-art accuracies for stereo depth estimation on the Scene Flow dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/cmsflash/efficient-attention.

Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism intrinsically provides meaningful insights on the internal behavior of the model. Can these insights be used as explanations? Debate rages on. In this paper, we mathematically study a simple attention-based architecture and pinpoint the differences between post-hoc and attention-based explanations. We show that they provide quite different results, and that, despite their limitations, post-hoc methods are capable of capturing more useful insights than merely examining the attention weights.

We introduce Adaptive Filter Attention (AFA), a novel attention mechanism that incorporates a learnable dynamics model directly into the computation of attention weights. Rather than comparing queries and keys directly, we model the input sequence as discrete observations of a linear stochastic differential equation (SDE). By imposing a linear dynamics model with simultaneously diagonalizable state matrices and noise covariances, we can make use of a closed-form solution to the differential Lyapunov equation to efficiently propagate pairwise uncertainties through the dynamics. Attention naturally arises as the maximum likelihood solution for this linear SDE, with attention weights corresponding to robust residual-based reweightings of the propagated pairwise precisions. Imposing an additional constraint on the state matrix's eigenvalues leads to a simplified variant with the same computational and memory complexity as standard attention. In the limit of vanishing dynamics and process noise, and using a small-angle approximation, we recover ordinary dot-product attention.

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in solving the Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) problem because of their rich generative priors. The recent development of diffusion transformer (DiT) has witnessed overwhelming performance over the traditional UNet-based architecture in image generation, which also raises the question: Can we adopt the advanced DiT-based diffusion model for Real-ISR? To this end, we propose our DiT4SR, one of the pioneering works to tame the large-scale DiT model for Real-ISR. Instead of directly injecting embeddings extracted from low-resolution (LR) images like ControlNet, we integrate the LR embeddings into the original attention mechanism of DiT, allowing for the bidirectional flow of information between the LR latent and the generated latent. The sufficient interaction of these two streams allows the LR stream to evolve with the diffusion process, producing progressively refined guidance that better aligns with the generated latent at each diffusion step. Additionally, the LR guidance is injected into the generated latent via a cross-stream convolution layer, compensating for DiT's limited ability to capture local information. These simple but effective designs endow the DiT model with superior performance in Real-ISR, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments. Project Page: https://adam-duan.github.io/projects/dit4sr/.

The extraction of aspect terms is a critical step in fine-grained sentiment analysis of text. Existing approaches for this task have yielded impressive results when the training and testing data are from the same domain. However, these methods show a drastic decrease in performance when applied to cross-domain settings where the domain of the testing data differs from that of the training data. To address this lack of extensibility and robustness, we propose a novel approach for automatically constructing domain-specific knowledge graphs that contain information relevant to the identification of aspect terms. We introduce a methodology for injecting information from these knowledge graphs into Transformer models, including two alternative mechanisms for knowledge insertion: via query enrichment and via manipulation of attention patterns. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets for cross-domain aspect term extraction using our approach and investigate how the amount of external knowledge available to the Transformer impacts model performance.

Video inpainting involves modifying local regions within a video, ensuring spatial and temporal consistency. Most existing methods focus primarily on scene completion (i.e., filling missing regions) and lack the capability to insert new objects into a scene in a controllable manner. Fortunately, recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models pave the way for text-guided video inpainting. However, directly adapting T2V models for inpainting remains limited in unifying completion and insertion tasks, lacks input controllability, and struggles with long videos, thereby restricting their applicability and flexibility. To address these challenges, we propose MTV-Inpaint, a unified multi-task video inpainting framework capable of handling both traditional scene completion and novel object insertion tasks. To unify these distinct tasks, we design a dual-branch spatial attention mechanism in the T2V diffusion U-Net, enabling seamless integration of scene completion and object insertion within a single framework. In addition to textual guidance, MTV-Inpaint supports multimodal control by integrating various image inpainting models through our proposed image-to-video (I2V) inpainting mode. Additionally, we propose a two-stage pipeline that combines keyframe inpainting with in-between frame propagation, enabling MTV-Inpaint to effectively handle long videos with hundreds of frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTV-Inpaint achieves state-of-the-art performance in both scene completion and object insertion tasks. Furthermore, it demonstrates versatility in derived applications such as multi-modal inpainting, object editing, removal, image object brush, and the ability to handle long videos. Project page: https://mtv-inpaint.github.io/.

This paper aims to manipulate multi-entity 3D motions in video generation. Previous methods on controllable video generation primarily leverage 2D control signals to manipulate object motions and have achieved remarkable synthesis results. However, 2D control signals are inherently limited in expressing the 3D nature of object motions. To overcome this problem, we introduce 3DTrajMaster, a robust controller that regulates multi-entity dynamics in 3D space, given user-desired 6DoF pose (location and rotation) sequences of entities. At the core of our approach is a plug-and-play 3D-motion grounded object injector that fuses multiple input entities with their respective 3D trajectories through a gated self-attention mechanism. In addition, we exploit an injector architecture to preserve the video diffusion prior, which is crucial for generalization ability. To mitigate video quality degradation, we introduce a domain adaptor during training and employ an annealed sampling strategy during inference. To address the lack of suitable training data, we construct a 360-Motion Dataset, which first correlates collected 3D human and animal assets with GPT-generated trajectory and then captures their motion with 12 evenly-surround cameras on diverse 3D UE platforms. Extensive experiments show that 3DTrajMaster sets a new state-of-the-art in both accuracy and generalization for controlling multi-entity 3D motions. Project page: http://fuxiao0719.github.io/projects/3dtrajmaster

In e-commerce and digital marketing, generating high-fidelity human-product demonstration videos is important for effective product presentation. However, most existing frameworks either fail to preserve the identities of both humans and products or lack an understanding of human-product spatial relationships, leading to unrealistic representations and unnatural interactions. To address these challenges, we propose a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based framework. Our method simultaneously preserves human identities and product-specific details, such as logos and textures, by injecting paired human-product reference information and utilizing an additional masked cross-attention mechanism. We employ a 3D body mesh template and product bounding boxes to provide precise motion guidance, enabling intuitive alignment of hand gestures with product placements. Additionally, structured text encoding is used to incorporate category-level semantics, enhancing 3D consistency during small rotational changes across frames. Trained on a hybrid dataset with extensive data augmentation strategies, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in maintaining the identity integrity of both humans and products and generating realistic demonstration motions. Project page: https://submit2025-dream.github.io/DreamActor-H1/.

Recently, text-to-image generation models have achieved remarkable advancements, particularly with diffusion models facilitating high-quality image synthesis from textual descriptions. However, these models often struggle with achieving precise control over pixel-level layouts, object appearances, and global styles when using text prompts alone. To mitigate this issue, previous works introduce conditional images as auxiliary inputs for image generation, enhancing control but typically necessitating specialized models tailored to different types of reference inputs. In this paper, we explore a new approach to unify controllable generation within a single framework. Specifically, we propose the unified image-instruction adapter (UNIC-Adapter) built on the Multi-Modal-Diffusion Transformer architecture, to enable flexible and controllable generation across diverse conditions without the need for multiple specialized models. Our UNIC-Adapter effectively extracts multi-modal instruction information by incorporating both conditional images and task instructions, injecting this information into the image generation process through a cross-attention mechanism enhanced by Rotary Position Embedding. Experimental results across a variety of tasks, including pixel-level spatial control, subject-driven image generation, and style-image-based image synthesis, demonstrate the effectiveness of our UNIC-Adapter in unified controllable image generation.

Feed-forward 3D modeling has emerged as a promising approach for rapid and high-quality 3D reconstruction. In particular, directly generating explicit 3D representations, such as 3D Gaussian splatting, has attracted significant attention due to its fast and high-quality rendering, as well as numerous applications. However, many state-of-the-art methods, primarily based on transformer architectures, suffer from severe scalability issues because they rely on full attention across image tokens from multiple input views, resulting in prohibitive computational costs as the number of views or image resolution increases. Toward a scalable and efficient feed-forward 3D reconstruction, we introduce an iterative Large 3D Reconstruction Model (iLRM) that generates 3D Gaussian representations through an iterative refinement mechanism, guided by three core principles: (1) decoupling the scene representation from input-view images to enable compact 3D representations; (2) decomposing fully-attentional multi-view interactions into a two-stage attention scheme to reduce computational costs; and (3) injecting high-resolution information at every layer to achieve high-fidelity reconstruction. Experimental results on widely used datasets, such as RE10K and DL3DV, demonstrate that iLRM outperforms existing methods in both reconstruction quality and speed. Notably, iLRM exhibits superior scalability, delivering significantly higher reconstruction quality under comparable computational cost by efficiently leveraging a larger number of input views.

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. Here we propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop reasoning failures through targeted memory injections on LLM attention heads. First, we analyze the per-layer activations of GPT-2 models in response to single and multi-hop prompts. We then propose a mechanism that allows users to inject pertinent prompt-specific information, which we refer to as "memories," at critical LLM locations during inference. By thus enabling the LLM to incorporate additional relevant information during inference, we enhance the quality of multi-hop prompt completions. We show empirically that a simple, efficient, and targeted memory injection into a key attention layer can often increase the probability of the desired next token in multi-hop tasks, by up to 424%.

The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions), sequence-dependent activations (where attention weights adapt to each input), a specific mathematical form (dot-product similarities plus softmax weighting), and coupling of queries and keys to evolving hidden states (grounding attention in the current layer). However, the necessity of each of these principles remains largely untested. In this work, we systematically deconstruct attention by designing controlled variants that selectively relax these principles, applied both uniformly across all layers and in hybrid architectures where only some layers retain standard attention. Our empirical analysis reveals that mechanisms for mixing tokens are indispensable, as their absence collapses models to near-random behavior, while the exact mathematical form and sequence dependency can be substantially relaxed, especially when preserved in just a subset of layers. Surprisingly, even variants that fail in isolation can achieve robust performance when interleaved with standard attention, highlighting a cooperative effect. These findings deepen our understanding of what truly underpins attention's effectiveness and open new avenues for simplifying language models without sacrificing performance.

Attention mechanism has emerged as a foundation module of modern deep learning models and has also empowered many milestones in various domains. Moreover, FlashAttention with IO-aware speedup resolves the efficiency issue of standard attention, further promoting its practicality. Beyond canonical attention, attention with bias also widely exists, such as relative position bias in vision and language models and pair representation bias in AlphaFold. In these works, prior knowledge is introduced as an additive bias term of attention weights to guide the learning process, which has been proven essential for model performance. Surprisingly, despite the common usage of attention with bias, its targeted efficiency optimization is still absent, which seriously hinders its wide applications in complex tasks. Diving into the computation of FlashAttention, we prove that its optimal efficiency is determined by the rank of the attention weight matrix. Inspired by this theoretical result, this paper presents FlashBias based on the low-rank compressed sensing theory, which can provide fast-exact computation for many widely used attention biases and a fast-accurate approximation for biases in general formalization. FlashBias can fully take advantage of the extremely optimized matrix multiplication operation in modern GPUs, achieving 1.5times speedup for AlphaFold, and over 2times speedup for attention with bias in vision and language models without loss of accuracy.

The attention mechanism is a critical component of Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows tokens in a sequence to interact with each other, but is order-invariant. Incorporating position encoding (PE) makes it possible to address by position, such as attending to the i-th token. However, current PE methods use token counts to derive position, and thus cannot generalize to higher levels of abstraction, such as attending to the i-th sentence. In this paper, we propose a new position encoding method, Contextual Position Encoding (CoPE), that allows positions to be conditioned on context by incrementing position only on certain tokens determined by the model. This allows more general position addressing such as attending to the i-th particular word, noun, or sentence. We show that CoPE can solve the selective copy, counting and Flip-Flop tasks where popular position embeddings fail, and improves perplexity on language modeling and coding tasks.

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review salient neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and discuss applications in which modeling attention has shown a significant impact. We also describe how attention has been used to improve the interpretability of neural networks. Finally, we discuss some future research directions in attention. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.

The study of the attention mechanism has sparked interest in many fields, such as language modeling and machine translation. Although its patterns have been exploited to perform different tasks, from neural network understanding to textual alignment, no previous work has analysed the encoder-decoder attention behavior in speech translation (ST) nor used it to improve ST on a specific task. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing an attention-based policy (EDAtt) for simultaneous ST (SimulST) that is motivated by an analysis of the existing attention relations between audio input and textual output. Its goal is to leverage the encoder-decoder attention scores to guide inference in real time. Results on en->{de, es} show that the EDAtt policy achieves overall better results compared to the SimulST state of the art, especially in terms of computational-aware latency.

In text-to-image generation tasks, the advancements of diffusion models have facilitated the fidelity of generated results. However, these models encounter challenges when processing text prompts containing multiple entities and attributes. The uneven distribution of attention results in the issues of entity leakage and attribute misalignment. Training from scratch to address this issue requires numerous labeled data and is resource-consuming. Motivated by this, we propose an attribution-focusing mechanism, a training-free phase-wise mechanism by modulation of attention for diffusion model. One of our core ideas is to guide the model to concentrate on the corresponding syntactic components of the prompt at distinct timesteps. To achieve this, we incorporate a temperature control mechanism within the early phases of the self-attention modules to mitigate entity leakage issues. An object-focused masking scheme and a phase-wise dynamic weight control mechanism are integrated into the cross-attention modules, enabling the model to discern the affiliation of semantic information between entities more effectively. The experimental results in various alignment scenarios demonstrate that our model attain better image-text alignment with minimal additional computational cost.

Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations of this architecture, without theoretical justification. In this work we show that there are dramatic trade-offs between the rank and number of heads of the attention mechanism. Specifically, we present a simple and natural target function that can be represented using a single full-rank attention head for any context length, but that cannot be approximated by low-rank attention unless the number of heads is exponential in the embedding dimension, even for short context lengths. Moreover, we prove that, for short context lengths, adding depth allows the target to be approximated by low-rank attention. For long contexts, we conjecture that full-rank attention is necessary. Finally, we present experiments with off-the-shelf transformers that validate our theoretical findings.

Convolutional neural networks have allowed remarkable advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) over the last decade. Among recent advances in SISR, attention mechanisms are crucial for high-performance SR models. However, the attention mechanism remains unclear on why and how it works in SISR. In this work, we attempt to quantify and visualize attention mechanisms in SISR and show that not all attention modules are equally beneficial. We then propose attention in attention network (A^2N) for more efficient and accurate SISR. Specifically, A^2N consists of a non-attention branch and a coupling attention branch. A dynamic attention module is proposed to generate weights for these two branches to suppress unwanted attention adjustments dynamically, where the weights change adaptively according to the input features. This allows attention modules to specialize to beneficial examples without otherwise penalties and thus greatly improve the capacity of the attention network with few parameters overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our final model A^2N could achieve superior trade-off performances comparing with state-of-the-art networks of similar sizes. Codes are available at https://github.com/haoyuc/A2N.

Attention is a fundamental component behind the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs). However, our current understanding of the attention mechanism, especially regarding how attention distributions are established, remains limited. Inspired by recent studies that explore the presence of attention sink in the initial token, which receives disproportionately large attention scores despite their lack of semantic importance, this work delves deeper into this phenomenon. We aim to provide a more profound understanding of the existence of attention sinks within LLMs and to uncover ways to enhance the achievable accuracy of LLMs by directly optimizing the attention distributions, without the need for weight finetuning. Specifically, this work begins with comprehensive visualizations of the attention distributions in LLMs during inference across various inputs and tasks. Based on these visualizations, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to discover that (1) attention sinks occur not only at the start of sequences but also within later tokens of the input, and (2) not all attention sinks have a positive impact on the achievable accuracy of LLMs. Building upon our findings, we propose a training-free Attention Calibration Technique (ACT) that automatically optimizes the attention distributions on the fly during inference in an input-adaptive manner. Extensive experiments validate that ACT consistently enhances the accuracy of various LLMs across different applications. Specifically, ACT achieves an average improvement of up to 7.30% in accuracy across different datasets when applied to Llama-30B. Our code is available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/ACT.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have notably improved the perceptual quality of generated images in text-to-image synthesis tasks. However, diffusion models often struggle to produce images that accurately reflect the intended semantics of the associated text prompts. We examine cross-attention layers in diffusion models and observe a propensity for these layers to disproportionately focus on certain tokens during the generation process, thereby undermining semantic fidelity. To address the issue of dominant attention, we introduce attention regulation, a computation-efficient on-the-fly optimization approach at inference time to align attention maps with the input text prompt. Notably, our method requires no additional training or fine-tuning and serves as a plug-in module on a model. Hence, the generation capacity of the original model is fully preserved. We compare our approach with alternative approaches across various datasets, evaluation metrics, and diffusion models. Experiment results show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, yielding images that more faithfully reflect the desired concepts with reduced computation overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/YaNgZhAnG-V5/attention_regulation.

Since the advent of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but remain largely as black-box systems. Consequently, their development relies heavily on data-driven approaches, limiting performance enhancement through changes in internal architecture and reasoning pathways. As a result, many researchers have begun exploring the potential internal mechanisms of LLMs, aiming to identify the essence of their reasoning bottlenecks, with most studies focusing on attention heads. Our survey aims to shed light on the internal reasoning processes of LLMs by concentrating on the interpretability and underlying mechanisms of attention heads. We first distill the human thought process into a four-stage framework: Knowledge Recalling, In-Context Identification, Latent Reasoning, and Expression Preparation. Using this framework, we systematically review existing research to identify and categorize the functions of specific attention heads. Furthermore, we summarize the experimental methodologies used to discover these special heads, dividing them into two categories: Modeling-Free methods and Modeling-Required methods. Also, we outline relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current research and propose several potential future directions. Our reference list is open-sourced at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/Awesome-Attention-Heads.

Although attention mechanisms have been applied to a variety of deep learning models and have been shown to improve the prediction performance, it has been reported to be vulnerable to perturbations to the mechanism. To overcome the vulnerability to perturbations in the mechanism, we are inspired by adversarial training (AT), which is a powerful regularization technique for enhancing the robustness of the models. In this paper, we propose a general training technique for natural language processing tasks, including AT for attention (Attention AT) and more interpretable AT for attention (Attention iAT). The proposed techniques improved the prediction performance and the model interpretability by exploiting the mechanisms with AT. In particular, Attention iAT boosts those advantages by introducing adversarial perturbation, which enhances the difference in the attention of the sentences. Evaluation experiments with ten open datasets revealed that AT for attention mechanisms, especially Attention iAT, demonstrated (1) the best performance in nine out of ten tasks and (2) more interpretable attention (i.e., the resulting attention correlated more strongly with gradient-based word importance) for all tasks. Additionally, the proposed techniques are (3) much less dependent on perturbation size in AT. Our code is available at https://github.com/shunk031/attention-meets-perturbation

The design choices in the Transformer attention mechanism, including weak inductive bias and quadratic computational complexity, have limited its application for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we introduce Mega, a simple, theoretically grounded, single-head gated attention mechanism equipped with (exponential) moving average to incorporate inductive bias of position-aware local dependencies into the position-agnostic attention mechanism. We further propose a variant of Mega that offers linear time and space complexity yet yields only minimal quality loss, by efficiently splitting the whole sequence into multiple chunks with fixed length. Extensive experiments on a wide range of sequence modeling benchmarks, including the Long Range Arena, neural machine translation, auto-regressive language modeling, and image and speech classification, show that Mega achieves significant improvements over other sequence models, including variants of Transformers and recent state space models.

The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers propose new attention augmentation methods to make transformers more accurate, efficient and interpretable. In this paper, we combine these two lines of research in a human-in-the-loop pipeline to first discover important task-specific attention patterns. Then those patterns are injected, not only to smaller models, but also to the original model. The benefits of our pipeline and discovered patterns are demonstrated in two case studies with extractive summarization and topic segmentation. After discovering interpretable patterns in BERT-based models fine-tuned for the two downstream tasks, experiments indicate that when we inject the patterns into attention heads, the models show considerable improvements in accuracy and efficiency.

Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while maintaining competitive performance. Although their efficiency and effectiveness have been extensively studied, the internal mechanisms that govern DLMs remain largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis of DLM attention patterns, focusing on the attention sinking phenomenon, an effect previously observed in various transformer-based architectures. Our findings reveal that DLMs also exhibit attention sinks, but with distinct characteristics. First, unlike in ARMs, the sink positions in DLMs tend to shift throughout the generation process, displaying a dynamic behaviour. Second, while ARMs are highly sensitive to the removal of attention sinks, DLMs remain robust: masking sinks leads to only a minor degradation in performance. These results provide new insights into the inner workings of diffusion-based language models and highlight fundamental differences in how they allocate and utilize attention compared to autoregressive models.

We introduce three new attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention in terms of efficiency and learning capabilities, thereby improving the performance and broader deployability of Transformer models. Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications. In addition to providing rigorous mathematical comparisons, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on MNIST, CIFAR100, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets.

Recent guidance methods in diffusion models steer reverse sampling by perturbing the model to construct an implicit weak model and guide generation away from it. Among these approaches, attention perturbation has demonstrated strong empirical performance in unconditional scenarios where classifier-free guidance is not applicable. However, existing attention perturbation methods lack principled approaches for determining where perturbations should be applied, particularly in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures where quality-relevant computations are distributed across layers. In this paper, we investigate the granularity of attention perturbations, ranging from the layer level down to individual attention heads, and discover that specific heads govern distinct visual concepts such as structure, style, and texture quality. Building on this insight, we propose "HeadHunter", a systematic framework for iteratively selecting attention heads that align with user-centric objectives, enabling fine-grained control over generation quality and visual attributes. In addition, we introduce SoftPAG, which linearly interpolates each selected head's attention map toward an identity matrix, providing a continuous knob to tune perturbation strength and suppress artifacts. Our approach not only mitigates the oversmoothing issues of existing layer-level perturbation but also enables targeted manipulation of specific visual styles through compositional head selection. We validate our method on modern large-scale DiT-based text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.1, demonstrating superior performance in both general quality enhancement and style-specific guidance. Our work provides the first head-level analysis of attention perturbation in diffusion models, uncovering interpretable specialization within attention layers and enabling practical design of effective perturbation strategies.

Despite the advancements in in-context learning (ICL) for large language models (LLMs), current research centers on specific prompt engineering, such as demonstration selection, with the expectation that a single iteration of demonstrations processing can generalize effectively to a given test sample. However, this perspective overlooks the potential benefits derived from multiple iterations involving demonstrations, a practice aligning more closely with the iterative decision-making process exhibited by humans, who often learn through analogy. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage framework to boost ICL in LLMs. Specifically, our framework delineates the ICL process into two distinct stages: Deep-Thinking and test stages. The Deep-Thinking stage incorporates a unique attention mechanism, i.e., iterative enhanced attention, which enables multiple rounds of information accumulation. This mechanism operates by manipulating the Key-Value matrices without training, fostering enhanced understanding capabilities in LLMs by thinking demonstrations multiple times. We evaluated Deep-Thinking across a range of benchmarks and LLMs, showing its superior performance over vanilla ICL methods and its effectiveness in challenging tasks where demonstration selection is infeasible.

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work positions attention as a privileged substrate that renders the internal logic of LLMs legible, not merely as a byproduct of computation, but as a mechanistic blueprint of reasoning itself. We first distinguish attention heads between locally and globally focused information processing and reveal that locally focused heads produce a sawtooth pattern near the diagonal indicating phrasal chunks, while globally focused heads expose tokens that exert broad downstream influence over future tokens. We formalize these with two metrics: 1) Windowed Average Attention Distance, which measures the extent of backward attention within a clipped window; 2) Future Attention Influence, which quantifies a token's global importance as the average attention it receives from subsequent tokens. Taken together, these signals reveal a recurring preplan-and-anchor mechanism, where the model first performs a long-range contextual reference to generate an introductory token, which is immediately followed by or coincides with a semantic anchor token that organizes subsequent reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce three novel RL strategies that dynamically perform targeted credit assignment to critical nodes (preplan tokens, anchor tokens, and their temporal coupling) and show consistent performance gains across various reasoning tasks. By aligning optimization with the model's intrinsic reasoning rhythm, we aim to transform opaque optimization into an actionable structure-aware process, hoping to offer a potential step toward more transparent and effective optimization of LLM reasoning.

The attention mechanism is a core primitive in modern large language models (LLMs) and AI more broadly. Since attention by itself is permutation-invariant, position encoding is essential for modeling structured domains such as language. Rotary position encoding (RoPE) has emerged as the de facto standard approach for position encoding and is part of many modern LLMs. However, in RoPE the key/query transformation between two elements in a sequence is only a function of their relative position and otherwise independent of the actual input. This limits the expressivity of RoPE-based transformers. This paper describes PaTH, a flexible data-dependent position encoding scheme based on accumulated products of Householder(like) transformations, where each transformation is data-dependent, i.e., a function of the input. We derive an efficient parallel algorithm for training through exploiting a compact representation of products of Householder matrices, and implement a FlashAttention-style blockwise algorithm that minimizes I/O cost. Across both targeted synthetic benchmarks and moderate-scale real-world language modeling experiments, we find that PaTH demonstrates superior performance compared to RoPE and other recent baselines.

We propose a novel attention mechanism, named Cog Attention, that enables attention weights to be negative for enhanced expressiveness, which stems from two key factors: (1) Cog Attention can shift the token deletion and copying function from a static OV matrix to dynamic QK inner products, with the OV matrix now focusing more on refinement or modification. The attention head can simultaneously delete, copy, or retain tokens by assigning them negative, positive, or minimal attention weights, respectively. As a result, a single attention head becomes more flexible and expressive. (2) Cog Attention improves the model's robustness against representational collapse, which can occur when earlier tokens are over-squashed into later positions, leading to homogeneous representations. Negative weights reduce effective information paths from earlier to later tokens, helping to mitigate this issue. We develop Transformer-like models which use Cog Attention as attention modules, including decoder-only models for language modeling and U-ViT diffusion models for image generation. Experiments show that models using Cog Attention exhibit superior performance compared to those employing traditional softmax attention modules. Our approach suggests a promising research direction for rethinking and breaking the entrenched constraints of traditional softmax attention, such as the requirement for non-negative weights.

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the computational and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in transformers from O(N^2) to O(N). In comparison to previous attempts, our work presents a linearly scaled attention mechanism that maintains the full representation of the attention matrix without compromising on sparsification and incorporates the all-to-all relationship between tokens. We explore the properties of our new attention metric and conduct tests in various standard settings. Results indicate that our attention mechanism has a robust performance and holds significant promise for diverse applications where self-attention is used.

Scaling the effective context length is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the quadratic increase in computational complexity inherent in traditional attention mechanisms presents a prohibitive overhead. Existing approaches either impose strongly biased structures, such as sink or window attention which are task-specific, or radically modify the attention mechanism into linear approximations, whose performance in complex reasoning tasks remains inadequately explored. In this work, we propose a solution that adheres to the ``less structure'' principle, allowing the model to determine where to attend autonomously, rather than introducing predefined biases. We introduce Mixture of Block Attention (MoBA), an innovative approach that applies the principles of Mixture of Experts (MoE) to the attention mechanism. This novel architecture demonstrates superior performance on long-context tasks while offering a key advantage: the ability to seamlessly transition between full and sparse attention, enhancing efficiency without the risk of compromising performance. MoBA has already been deployed to support Kimi's long-context requests and demonstrates significant advancements in efficient attention computation for LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/MoonshotAI/MoBA.

This research delves into the problem of interactive editing of human motion generation. Previous motion diffusion models lack explicit modeling of the word-level text-motion correspondence and good explainability, hence restricting their fine-grained editing ability. To address this issue, we propose an attention-based motion diffusion model, namely MotionCLR, with CLeaR modeling of attention mechanisms. Technically, MotionCLR models the in-modality and cross-modality interactions with self-attention and cross-attention, respectively. More specifically, the self-attention mechanism aims to measure the sequential similarity between frames and impacts the order of motion features. By contrast, the cross-attention mechanism works to find the fine-grained word-sequence correspondence and activate the corresponding timesteps in the motion sequence. Based on these key properties, we develop a versatile set of simple yet effective motion editing methods via manipulating attention maps, such as motion (de-)emphasizing, in-place motion replacement, and example-based motion generation, etc. For further verification of the explainability of the attention mechanism, we additionally explore the potential of action-counting and grounded motion generation ability via attention maps. Our experimental results show that our method enjoys good generation and editing ability with good explainability.

Soft attention is a critical mechanism powering LLMs to locate relevant parts within a given context. However, individual attention weights are determined by the similarity of only a single query and key token vector. This "single token attention" bottlenecks the amount of information used in distinguishing a relevant part from the rest of the context. To address this issue, we propose a new attention method, Multi-Token Attention (MTA), which allows LLMs to condition their attention weights on multiple query and key vectors simultaneously. This is achieved by applying convolution operations over queries, keys and heads, allowing nearby queries and keys to affect each other's attention weights for more precise attention. As a result, our method can locate relevant context using richer, more nuanced information that can exceed a single vector's capacity. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that MTA achieves enhanced performance on a range of popular benchmarks. Notably, it outperforms Transformer baseline models on standard language modeling tasks, and on tasks that require searching for information within long contexts, where our method's ability to leverage richer information proves particularly beneficial.

In recent years, the long-range attention mechanism of vision transformers has driven significant performance breakthroughs across various computer vision tasks. However, the traditional self-attention mechanism, which processes both informative and non-informative tokens, suffers from inefficiency and inaccuracies. While sparse attention mechanisms have been introduced to mitigate these issues by pruning tokens involved in attention, they often lack context-awareness and intelligence. These mechanisms frequently apply a uniform token selection strategy across different inputs for batch training or optimize efficiency only for the inference stage. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm: Select and Pack Attention (SPA). SPA dynamically selects informative tokens using a low-cost gating layer supervised by selection labels and packs these tokens into new batches, enabling a variable number of tokens to be used in parallelized GPU batch training and inference. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and computer vision tasks demonstrate that SPA delivers superior performance and efficiency, including a 0.6 mAP improvement in object detection and a 16.4% reduction in computational costs.

Multi-head attention (MHA) has become the cornerstone of modern large language models, enhancing representational capacity through parallel attention heads. However, increasing the number of heads inherently weakens individual head capacity, and existing attention mechanisms - whether standard MHA or its variants like grouped-query attention (GQA) and grouped-tied attention (GTA) - simply concatenate outputs from isolated heads without strong interaction. To address this limitation, we propose knocking-heads attention (KHA), which enables attention heads to "knock" on each other - facilitating cross-head feature-level interactions before the scaled dot-product attention. This is achieved by applying a shared, diagonally-initialized projection matrix across all heads. The diagonal initialization preserves head-specific specialization at the start of training while allowing the model to progressively learn integrated cross-head representations. KHA adds only minimal parameters and FLOPs and can be seamlessly integrated into MHA, GQA, GTA, and other attention variants. We validate KHA by training a 6.1B parameter MoE model (1.01B activated) on 1T high-quality tokens. Compared to baseline attention mechanisms, KHA brings superior and more stable training dynamics, achieving better performance across downstream tasks.

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling up to bigger models. Previous methods mainly utilize the similarity decomposition and the associativity of matrix multiplication to devise linear-time attention mechanisms. They avoid degeneration of attention to a trivial distribution by reintroducing inductive biases such as the locality, thereby at the expense of model generality and expressiveness. In this paper, we linearize Transformers free from specific inductive biases based on the flow network theory. We cast attention as the information flow aggregated from the sources (values) to the sinks (results) through the learned flow capacities (attentions). Within this framework, we apply the property of flow conservation into attention and propose the Flow-Attention mechanism of linear complexity. By respectively conserving the incoming flow of sinks for source competition and the outgoing flow of sources for sink allocation, Flow-Attention inherently generates informative attentions without using specific inductive biases. Empowered by the Flow-Attention, Flowformer yields strong performance in linear time for wide areas, including long sequence, time series, vision, natural language, and reinforcement learning. The code and settings are available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Flowformer.

In large language models, the demand for modeling long contexts is constantly increasing, but the quadratic complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism often becomes a bottleneck. Although existing sparse attention mechanisms have improved efficiency, they may still encounter issues such as static patterns or information loss. We introduce a trainable dynamic mask sparse attention mechanism, Dynamic Mask Attention, which effectively utilizes content-aware and position-aware sparsity. DMA achieves this through two key innovations: First, it dynamically generates content-aware sparse masks from value representations, enabling the model to identify and focus on critical information adaptively. Second, it implements position-aware sparse attention computation that effectively skips unnecessary calculation regions. This dual-sparsity design allows the model to significantly reduce the computational complexity of important information while retaining complete information, achieving an excellent balance between information fidelity and computational efficiency. We have verified the performance of DMA through comprehensive experiments. Comparative studies show that DMA outperforms multi-head attention, sliding window attention, multi-head latent attention, and native sparse attention in terms of perplexity under Chinchilla Scaling Law settings. Moreover, in challenging multi-query associative recall tasks, DMA also demonstrates superior performance and efficiency compared to these methods. Crucially, in the evaluation of a 1.7B parameter model, DMA significantly outperforms multi-head attention in both standard benchmark performance and the challenging needle-in-a-haystack task. These experimental results highlight its capability to balance model efficiency and long-context modeling ability effectively.

Transformer-based diffusion models have recently superseded traditional U-Net architectures, with multimodal diffusion transformers (MM-DiT) emerging as the dominant approach in state-of-the-art models like Stable Diffusion 3 and Flux.1. Previous approaches have relied on unidirectional cross-attention mechanisms, with information flowing from text embeddings to image latents. In contrast, MMDiT introduces a unified attention mechanism that concatenates input projections from both modalities and performs a single full attention operation, allowing bidirectional information flow between text and image branches. This architectural shift presents significant challenges for existing editing techniques. In this paper, we systematically analyze MM-DiT's attention mechanism by decomposing attention matrices into four distinct blocks, revealing their inherent characteristics. Through these analyses, we propose a robust, prompt-based image editing method for MM-DiT that supports global to local edits across various MM-DiT variants, including few-step models. We believe our findings bridge the gap between existing U-Net-based methods and emerging architectures, offering deeper insights into MMDiT's behavioral patterns.

In this work, we upgrade the multi-head attention mechanism, the core of the Transformer model, to improve efficiency while maintaining or surpassing the previous accuracy level. We show that multi-head attention can be expressed in the summation form. Drawing on the insight that not all attention heads hold equal significance, we propose Mixture-of-Head attention (MoH), a new architecture that treats attention heads as experts in the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism. MoH has two significant advantages: First, MoH enables each token to select the appropriate attention heads, enhancing inference efficiency without compromising accuracy or increasing the number of parameters. Second, MoH replaces the standard summation in multi-head attention with a weighted summation, introducing flexibility to the attention mechanism and unlocking extra performance potential. Extensive experiments on ViT, DiT, and LLMs demonstrate that MoH outperforms multi-head attention by using only 50%-90% of the attention heads. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained multi-head attention models, such as LLaMA3-8B, can be further continue-tuned into our MoH models. Notably, MoH-LLaMA3-8B achieves an average accuracy of 64.0% across 14 benchmarks, outperforming LLaMA3-8B by 2.4% by utilizing only 75% of the attention heads. We believe the proposed MoH is a promising alternative to multi-head attention and provides a strong foundation for developing advanced and efficient attention-based models.

In modern large language models (LLMs), increasing sequence lengths is a crucial challenge for enhancing their comprehension and coherence in handling complex tasks such as multi-modal question answering. However, handling long context sequences with LLMs is prohibitively costly due to the conventional attention mechanism's quadratic time and space complexity, and the context window size is limited by the GPU memory. Although recent works have proposed linear and sparse attention mechanisms to address this issue, their real-world applicability is often limited by the need to re-train pre-trained models. In response, we propose a novel approach, Hierarchically Pruned Attention (HiP), which simultaneously reduces the training and inference time complexity from O(T^2) to O(T log T) and the space complexity from O(T^2) to O(T). To this end, we devise a dynamic sparse attention mechanism that generates an attention mask through a novel tree-search-like algorithm for a given query on the fly. HiP is training-free as it only utilizes the pre-trained attention scores to spot the positions of the top-k most significant elements for each query. Moreover, it ensures that no token is overlooked, unlike the sliding window-based sub-quadratic attention methods, such as StreamingLLM. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world benchmarks demonstrate that HiP significantly reduces prompt (i.e., prefill) and decoding latency and memory usage while maintaining high generation performance with little or no degradation. As HiP allows pretrained LLMs to scale to millions of tokens on commodity GPUs with no additional engineering due to its easy plug-and-play deployment, we believe that our work will have a large practical impact, opening up the possibility to many long-context LLM applications previously infeasible.

Explainability and interpretability of AI models is an essential factor affecting the safety of AI. While various explainable AI (XAI) approaches aim at mitigating the lack of transparency in deep networks, the evidence of the effectiveness of these approaches in improving usability, trust, and understanding of AI systems are still missing. We evaluate multimodal explanations in the setting of a Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, by asking users to predict the response accuracy of a VQA agent with and without explanations. We use between-subjects and within-subjects experiments to probe explanation effectiveness in terms of improving user prediction accuracy, confidence, and reliance, among other factors. The results indicate that the explanations help improve human prediction accuracy, especially in trials when the VQA system's answer is inaccurate. Furthermore, we introduce active attention, a novel method for evaluating causal attentional effects through intervention by editing attention maps. User explanation ratings are strongly correlated with human prediction accuracy and suggest the efficacy of these explanations in human-machine AI collaboration tasks.

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification-applying a head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)-consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates 'attention sink' and enhances long-context extrapolation performance, and we also release related https://github.com/qiuzh20/gated_attention{codes} and https://huggingface.co/QwQZh/gated_attention{models} to facilitate future research.

Web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) must process lengthy web page observations to complete user goals; these pages often exceed tens of thousands of tokens. This saturates context limits and increases computational cost processing; moreover, processing full pages exposes agents to security risks such as prompt injection. Existing pruning strategies either discard relevant content or retain irrelevant context, leading to suboptimal action prediction. We introduce FocusAgent, a simple yet effective approach that leverages a lightweight LLM retriever to extract the most relevant lines from accessibility tree (AxTree) observations, guided by task goals. By pruning noisy and irrelevant content, FocusAgent enables efficient reasoning while reducing vulnerability to injection attacks. Experiments on WorkArena and WebArena benchmarks show that FocusAgent matches the performance of strong baselines, while reducing observation size by over 50%. Furthermore, a variant of FocusAgent significantly reduces the success rate of prompt-injection attacks, including banner and pop-up attacks, while maintaining task success performance in attack-free settings. Our results highlight that targeted LLM-based retrieval is a practical and robust strategy for building web agents that are efficient, effective, and secure.

The dot product attention mechanism, originally designed for natural language processing tasks, is a cornerstone of modern Transformers. It adeptly captures semantic relationships between word pairs in sentences by computing a similarity overlap between queries and keys. In this work, we explore the suitability of Transformers, focusing on their attention mechanisms, in the specific domain of the parametrization of variational wave functions to approximate ground states of quantum many-body spin Hamiltonians. Specifically, we perform numerical simulations on the two-dimensional J_1-J_2 Heisenberg model, a common benchmark in the field of quantum many-body systems on lattice. By comparing the performance of standard attention mechanisms with a simplified version that excludes queries and keys, relying solely on positions, we achieve competitive results while reducing computational cost and parameter usage. Furthermore, through the analysis of the attention maps generated by standard attention mechanisms, we show that the attention weights become effectively input-independent at the end of the optimization. We support the numerical results with analytical calculations, providing physical insights of why queries and keys should be, in principle, omitted from the attention mechanism when studying large systems.

Although attention mechanisms have become fundamental components of deep learning models, they are vulnerable to perturbations, which may degrade the prediction performance and model interpretability. Adversarial training (AT) for attention mechanisms has successfully reduced such drawbacks by considering adversarial perturbations. However, this technique requires label information, and thus, its use is limited to supervised settings. In this study, we explore the concept of incorporating virtual AT (VAT) into the attention mechanisms, by which adversarial perturbations can be computed even from unlabeled data. To realize this approach, we propose two general training techniques, namely VAT for attention mechanisms (Attention VAT) and "interpretable" VAT for attention mechanisms (Attention iVAT), which extend AT for attention mechanisms to a semi-supervised setting. In particular, Attention iVAT focuses on the differences in attention; thus, it can efficiently learn clearer attention and improve model interpretability, even with unlabeled data. Empirical experiments based on six public datasets revealed that our techniques provide better prediction performance than conventional AT-based as well as VAT-based techniques, and stronger agreement with evidence that is provided by humans in detecting important words in sentences. Moreover, our proposal offers these advantages without needing to add the careful selection of unlabeled data. That is, even if the model using our VAT-based technique is trained on unlabeled data from a source other than the target task, both the prediction performance and model interpretability can be improved.

System-prompting is a standard tool for customizing language-model chatbots, enabling them to follow a specific instruction. An implicit assumption in the use of system prompts is that they will be stable, so the chatbot will continue to generate text according to the stipulated instructions for the duration of a conversation. We propose a quantitative benchmark to test this assumption, evaluating instruction stability via self-chats between two instructed chatbots. Testing popular models like LLaMA2-chat-70B and GPT-3.5, we reveal a significant instruction drift within eight rounds of conversations. An empirical and theoretical analysis of this phenomenon suggests the transformer attention mechanism plays a role, due to attention decay over long exchanges. To combat attention decay and instruction drift, we propose a lightweight method called split-softmax, which compares favorably against two strong baselines.

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this issue, but they typically require post-hoc adjustments after pretraining, such as rescaling or hyperparameters retuning. This paper introduces Token-Aware Phase Attention (TAPA), a new positional encoding method that incorporates a learnable phase function into the attention mechanism. TAPA preserves token interactions over long range, extends to longer contexts with direct and light fine-tuning, extrapolates to unseen lengths, and attains significantly lower perplexity on long-context than RoPE families.

While explicit positional encodings such as RoPE are a primary source of positional information in Transformer decoders, the causal mask also provides positional information. In this work, we prove that the causal mask can induce position-dependent patterns in attention scores, even without parameters or causal dependency in the input. Our theoretical analysis indicates that the induced attention pattern tends to favor nearby query-key pairs, mirroring the behavior of common positional encodings. Empirical analysis confirms that trained models exhibit the same behavior, with learned parameters further amplifying these patterns. Notably, we found that the interaction of causal mask and RoPE distorts RoPE's relative attention score patterns into non-relative ones. We consistently observed this effect in modern large language models, suggesting the importance of considering the causal mask as a source of positional information alongside explicit positional encodings.

Attention mechanism has been widely believed as the key to success of vision transformers (ViTs), since it provides a flexible and powerful way to model spatial relationships. However, is the attention mechanism truly an indispensable part of ViT? Can it be replaced by some other alternatives? To demystify the role of attention mechanism, we simplify it into an extremely simple case: ZERO FLOP and ZERO parameter. Concretely, we revisit the shift operation. It does not contain any parameter or arithmetic calculation. The only operation is to exchange a small portion of the channels between neighboring features. Based on this simple operation, we construct a new backbone network, namely ShiftViT, where the attention layers in ViT are substituted by shift operations. Surprisingly, ShiftViT works quite well in several mainstream tasks, e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation. The performance is on par with or even better than the strong baseline Swin Transformer. These results suggest that the attention mechanism might not be the vital factor that makes ViT successful. It can be even replaced by a zero-parameter operation. We should pay more attentions to the remaining parts of ViT in the future work. Code is available at github.com/microsoft/SPACH.

Benefiting from the capability of building inter-dependencies among channels or spatial locations, attention mechanisms have been extensively studied and broadly used in a variety of computer vision tasks recently. In this paper, we investigate light-weight but effective attention mechanisms and present triplet attention, a novel method for computing attention weights by capturing cross-dimension interaction using a three-branch structure. For an input tensor, triplet attention builds inter-dimensional dependencies by the rotation operation followed by residual transformations and encodes inter-channel and spatial information with negligible computational overhead. Our method is simple as well as efficient and can be easily plugged into classic backbone networks as an add-on module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various challenging tasks including image classification on ImageNet-1k and object detection on MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC datasets. Furthermore, we provide extensive in-sight into the performance of triplet attention by visually inspecting the GradCAM and GradCAM++ results. The empirical evaluation of our method supports our intuition on the importance of capturing dependencies across dimensions when computing attention weights. Code for this paper can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/LandskapeAI/triplet-attention

Attention-based arbitrary style transfer studies have shown promising performance in synthesizing vivid local style details. They typically use the all-to-all attention mechanism -- each position of content features is fully matched to all positions of style features. However, all-to-all attention tends to generate distorted style patterns and has quadratic complexity, limiting the effectiveness and efficiency of arbitrary style transfer. In this paper, we propose a novel all-to-key attention mechanism -- each position of content features is matched to stable key positions of style features -- that is more in line with the characteristics of style transfer. Specifically, it integrates two newly proposed attention forms: distributed and progressive attention. Distributed attention assigns attention to key style representations that depict the style distribution of local regions; Progressive attention pays attention from coarse-grained regions to fine-grained key positions. The resultant module, dubbed StyA2K, shows extraordinary performance in preserving the semantic structure and rendering consistent style patterns. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.

The Transformer architecture processes sequences by implementing a form of neural message-passing that consists of iterative information retrieval (attention), followed by local processing (position-wise MLP). Two types of information are essential under this general computational paradigm: "sensory" information about individual objects, and "relational" information describing the relationships between objects. Standard attention naturally encodes the former, but does not explicitly encode the latter. In this paper, we present an extension of Transformers where multi-head attention is augmented with two distinct types of attention heads, each routing information of a different type. The first type is the standard attention mechanism of Transformers, which captures object-level features, while the second type is a novel attention mechanism we propose to explicitly capture relational information. The two types of attention heads each possess different inductive biases, giving the resulting architecture greater efficiency and versatility. The promise of this approach is demonstrated empirically across a range of tasks.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However, recent findings indicate that LMMs have an extraordinary tendency to consistently allocate high attention weights to specific visual tokens, even when these tokens are irrelevant to the corresponding text. In this study, we investigate the property behind the appearance of these irrelevant visual tokens and examine their characteristics. Our findings show that this behavior arises due to the massive activation of certain hidden state dimensions, which resembles the attention sink found in language models. Hence, we refer to this phenomenon as the visual attention sink. In particular, our analysis reveals that removing the irrelevant visual sink tokens does not impact model performance, despite receiving high attention weights. Consequently, we recycle the attention to these tokens as surplus resources, redistributing the attention budget to enhance focus on the image. To achieve this, we introduce Visual Attention Redistribution (VAR), a method that redistributes attention in image-centric heads, which we identify as innately focusing on visual information. VAR can be seamlessly applied across different LMMs to improve performance on a wide range of tasks, including general vision-language tasks, visual hallucination tasks, and vision-centric tasks, all without the need for additional training, models, or inference steps. Experimental results demonstrate that VAR enables LMMs to process visual information more effectively by adjusting their internal attention mechanisms, offering a new direction to enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LMMs.

Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has shown that behaviors in language models can be successfully reverse-engineered through circuit analysis. A common criticism, however, is that each circuit is task-specific, and thus such analysis cannot contribute to understanding the models at a higher level. In this work, we present evidence that insights (both low-level findings about specific heads and higher-level findings about general algorithms) can indeed generalize across tasks. Specifically, we study the circuit discovered in Wang et al. (2022) for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task and 1.) show that it reproduces on a larger GPT2 model, and 2.) that it is mostly reused to solve a seemingly different task: Colored Objects (Ippolito & Callison-Burch, 2023). We provide evidence that the process underlying both tasks is functionally very similar, and contains about a 78% overlap in in-circuit attention heads. We further present a proof-of-concept intervention experiment, in which we adjust four attention heads in middle layers in order to 'repair' the Colored Objects circuit and make it behave like the IOI circuit. In doing so, we boost accuracy from 49.6% to 93.7% on the Colored Objects task and explain most sources of error. The intervention affects downstream attention heads in specific ways predicted by their interactions in the IOI circuit, indicating that this subcircuit behavior is invariant to the different task inputs. Overall, our results provide evidence that it may yet be possible to explain large language models' behavior in terms of a relatively small number of interpretable task-general algorithmic building blocks and computational components.

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with feed-forward networks, enabling a more expressive representation of relationships between tokens. This approach modifies only the attention matrix calculation while preserving the matrix dimensions, making it easily adaptable to existing transformer-based architectures. We provide a detailed mathematical justification for why Neural Attention increases representational capacity and conduct controlled experiments to validate this claim. When comparing Neural Attention and Dot-Product Attention, NLP experiments on WikiText-103 show a reduction in perplexity of over 5 percent. Similarly, experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show comparable improvements for image classification tasks. While Neural Attention introduces higher computational demands, we develop techniques to mitigate these challenges, ensuring practical usability without sacrificing the increased expressivity it provides. This work establishes Neural Attention as an effective means of enhancing the predictive capabilities of transformer models across a variety of applications.

Attention sink (AS) is a consistent pattern in transformer attention maps where certain tokens (often special tokens or positional anchors) disproportionately attract attention from other tokens. We show that in transformers, AS is not an architectural artifact, but it is the manifestation of a fundamental geometric principle: the establishment of reference frames that anchor representational spaces. We analyze several architectures and identify three distinct reference frame types, centralized, distributed, and bidirectional, that correlate with the attention sink phenomenon. We show that they emerge during the earliest stages of training as optimal solutions to the problem of establishing stable coordinate systems in high-dimensional spaces. We show the influence of architecture components, particularly position encoding implementations, on the specific type of reference frame. This perspective transforms our understanding of transformer attention mechanisms and provides insights for both architecture design and the relationship with AS.

Recent advances in diffusion models have enhanced multimodal-guided visual generation, enabling customized subject insertion that seamlessly "brushes" user-specified objects into a given image guided by textual prompts. However, existing methods often struggle to insert customized subjects with high fidelity and align results with the user's intent through textual prompts. In this work, we propose "In-Context Brush", a zero-shot framework for customized subject insertion by reformulating the task within the paradigm of in-context learning. Without loss of generality, we formulate the object image and the textual prompts as cross-modal demonstrations, and the target image with the masked region as the query. The goal is to inpaint the target image with the subject aligning textual prompts without model tuning. Building upon a pretrained MMDiT-based inpainting network, we perform test-time enhancement via dual-level latent space manipulation: intra-head "latent feature shifting" within each attention head that dynamically shifts attention outputs to reflect the desired subject semantics and inter-head "attention reweighting" across different heads that amplifies prompt controllability through differential attention prioritization. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate that our approach achieves superior identity preservation, text alignment, and image quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, without requiring dedicated training or additional data collection.

While Attention has come to be an important mechanism in deep learning, there remains limited intuition for why it works so well. Here, we show that Transformer Attention can be closely related under certain data conditions to Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM), a biologically plausible associative memory model. We confirm that these conditions are satisfied in pre-trained GPT2 Transformer models. We discuss the implications of the Attention-SDM map and provide new computational and biological interpretations of Attention.

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing LLMs for tool-use. Specifically, the crucial information in the context will be potentially overlooked by model when it is positioned in the trough zone of the attention waveform, leading to decreased performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference method named Attention Buckets. It allows LLMs to process their input through multiple parallel processes. Each process utilizes a distinct base angle for the rotary position embedding, thereby creating a unique attention waveform. By compensating an attention trough of a particular process with an attention peak of another process, our approach enhances LLM's awareness to various contextual positions, thus mitigating the risk of overlooking crucial information. In the largest tool-use benchmark, our method elevates a 7B model to achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to that of GPT-4. On other benchmarks and some RAG tasks, which also demand a thorough understanding of contextual content, Attention Buckets also exhibited notable enhancements in performance.

The Multi-Head Attention mechanism is central to LLM operation, and multiple works target its compute and memory efficiency during training. While most works focus on approximating the scaled dot product, the memory consumption of the linear projections that compute the Q, K, and V tensors from the input x is often overlooked. To address this, we propose Point-Approximate Matrix Multiplication (PAMM), a novel tensor compression technique that reduces memory consumption of the Q,K,V projections in attention layers by a factor of up to times 512, effectively erasing their memory footprint, while achieving similar or better final perplexity. PAMM is fully composable with efficient attention techniques such as FlashAttention, making it a practical and complementary method for memory-efficient LLM training.

Recent advances in training-free attention control methods have enabled flexible and efficient text-guided editing capabilities for existing generation models. However, current approaches struggle to simultaneously deliver strong editing strength while preserving consistency with the source. This limitation becomes particularly critical in multi-round and video editing, where visual errors can accumulate over time. Moreover, most existing methods enforce global consistency, which limits their ability to modify individual attributes such as texture while preserving others, thereby hindering fine-grained editing. Recently, the architectural shift from U-Net to MM-DiT has brought significant improvements in generative performance and introduced a novel mechanism for integrating text and vision modalities. These advancements pave the way for overcoming challenges that previous methods failed to resolve. Through an in-depth analysis of MM-DiT, we identify three key insights into its attention mechanisms. Building on these, we propose ConsistEdit, a novel attention control method specifically tailored for MM-DiT. ConsistEdit incorporates vision-only attention control, mask-guided pre-attention fusion, and differentiated manipulation of the query, key, and value tokens to produce consistent, prompt-aligned edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistEdit achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of image and video editing tasks, including both structure-consistent and structure-inconsistent scenarios. Unlike prior methods, it is the first approach to perform editing across all inference steps and attention layers without handcraft, significantly enhancing reliability and consistency, which enables robust multi-round and multi-region editing. Furthermore, it supports progressive adjustment of structural consistency, enabling finer control.

In recent years, attention-like mechanisms have been used to great success in the space of large language models, unlocking scaling potential to a previously unthinkable extent. "Attention Is All You Need" famously claims RNN cells are not needed in conjunction with attention. We challenge this view. In this paper, we point to existing proofs that architectures with fully parallelizable forward or backward passes cannot represent classes of problems specifically interesting for long-running agentic tasks. We further conjecture a critical time t beyond which non-recurrence-complete models fail to aggregate inputs correctly, with concrete implications for agentic systems (e.g., software engineering agents). To address this, we introduce a recurrence-complete architecture and train it on GitHub-derived action sequences. Loss follows a power law in the trained sequence length while the parameter count remains fixed. Moreover, longer-sequence training always amortizes its linearly increasing wall-time cost, yielding lower loss as a function of wall time.

Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers that allows these models to learn rich, contextual relationships between elements of a sequence. The main idea behind our method is to visualize a joint embedding of the query and key vectors used by transformer models to compute attention. Unlike previous attention visualization techniques, our approach enables the analysis of global patterns across multiple input sequences. We create an interactive visualization tool, AttentionViz, based on these joint query-key embeddings, and use it to study attention mechanisms in both language and vision transformers. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in improving model understanding and offering new insights about query-key interactions through several application scenarios and expert feedback.

Many papers have shown that attention heads work in conjunction with each other to perform complex tasks. It's frequently assumed that communication between attention heads is via the addition of specific features to token residuals. In this work we seek to isolate and identify the features used to effect communication and coordination among attention heads in GPT-2 small. Our key leverage on the problem is to show that these features are very often sparsely coded in the singular vectors of attention head matrices. We characterize the dimensionality and occurrence of these signals across the attention heads in GPT-2 small when used for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. The sparse encoding of signals, as provided by attention head singular vectors, allows for efficient separation of signals from the residual background and straightforward identification of communication paths between attention heads. We explore the effectiveness of this approach by tracing portions of the circuits used in the IOI task. Our traces reveal considerable detail not present in previous studies, shedding light on the nature of redundant paths present in GPT-2. And our traces go beyond previous work by identifying features used to communicate between attention heads when performing IOI.

Attention guides our gaze to fixate the proper location of the scene and holds it in that location for the deserved amount of time given current processing demands, before shifting to the next one. As such, gaze deployment crucially is a temporal process. Existing computational models have made significant strides in predicting spatial aspects of observer's visual scanpaths (where to look), while often putting on the background the temporal facet of attention dynamics (when). In this paper we present TPP-Gaze, a novel and principled approach to model scanpath dynamics based on Neural Temporal Point Process (TPP), that jointly learns the temporal dynamics of fixations position and duration, integrating deep learning methodologies with point process theory. We conduct extensive experiments across five publicly available datasets. Our results show the overall superior performance of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/phuselab/tppgaze.

We present Pyramid Attention Broadcast (PAB), a real-time, high quality and training-free approach for DiT-based video generation. Our method is founded on the observation that attention difference in the diffusion process exhibits a U-shaped pattern, indicating significant redundancy. We mitigate this by broadcasting attention outputs to subsequent steps in a pyramid style. It applies different broadcast strategies to each attention based on their variance for best efficiency. We further introduce broadcast sequence parallel for more efficient distributed inference. PAB demonstrates superior results across three models compared to baselines, achieving real-time generation for up to 720p videos. We anticipate that our simple yet effective method will serve as a robust baseline and facilitate future research and application for video generation.

Scaling pre-trained language models has resulted in large performance gains in various natural language processing tasks but comes with a large cost in memory requirements. Inspired by the position embeddings in transformers, we aim to simplify and reduce the memory footprint of the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism. We propose an alternative module that uses only a single shared projection matrix and multiple head embeddings (MHE), i.e. one per head. We empirically demonstrate that our MHE attention is substantially more memory efficient compared to alternative attention mechanisms while achieving high predictive performance retention ratio to vanilla MHA on several downstream tasks. MHE attention only requires a negligible fraction of additional parameters (3nd, where n is the number of attention heads and d the size of the head embeddings) compared to a single-head attention, while MHA requires (3n^2-3n)d^2-3nd additional parameters.

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do not always attend to these instructions reliably, and users lack simple mechanisms to emphasize their importance beyond modifying prompt wording or structure. To address this, we present an inference-time method that enables users to emphasize specific parts of their prompt by steering the model's attention toward them, aligning the model's perceived importance of different prompt tokens with user intent. Unlike prior approaches that are limited to static instructions, require significant offline profiling, or rely on fixed biases, we dynamically update the proportion of model attention given to the user-specified parts--ensuring improved instruction following without performance degradation. We demonstrate that our approach improves instruction following across a variety of tasks involving multiple instructions and generalizes across models of varying scales.

Currently, instruction-based image editing methods have made significant progress by leveraging the powerful cross-modal understanding capabilities of vision language models (VLMs). However, they still face challenges in three key areas: 1) complex scenarios; 2) semantic consistency; and 3) fine-grained editing. To address these issues, we propose FireEdit, an innovative Fine-grained Instruction-based image editing framework that exploits a REgion-aware VLM. FireEdit is designed to accurately comprehend user instructions and ensure effective control over the editing process. Specifically, we enhance the fine-grained visual perception capabilities of the VLM by introducing additional region tokens. Relying solely on the output of the LLM to guide the diffusion model may lead to suboptimal editing results. Therefore, we propose a Time-Aware Target Injection module and a Hybrid Visual Cross Attention module. The former dynamically adjusts the guidance strength at various denoising stages by integrating timestep embeddings with the text embeddings. The latter enhances visual details for image editing, thereby preserving semantic consistency between the edited result and the source image. By combining the VLM enhanced with fine-grained region tokens and the time-dependent diffusion model, FireEdit demonstrates significant advantages in comprehending editing instructions and maintaining high semantic consistency. Extensive experiments indicate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art instruction-based image editing methods. Our project is available at https://zjgans.github.io/fireedit.github.io.

This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms. We begin with a theoretical framework that enables the identification of the model's selective ability and the geometric separation involved in token selection. Our analysis includes explicit bounds on distances and separation criteria for token vectors under softmax scaling. Through experiments with pre-trained GPT-2 model, we empirically validate our theoretical results and analyze key behaviors of the attention mechanism. Notably, we demonstrate that as the number of selected tokens increases, the model's ability to distinguish informative tokens declines, often converging toward a uniform selection pattern. We also show that gradient sensitivity under softmax normalization presents challenges during training, especially at low temperature settings. These findings advance current understanding of softmax-based attention mechanism and motivate the need for more robust normalization and selection strategies in future attention architectures.

When an image generation process is guided by both a text prompt and spatial cues, such as a set of bounding boxes, do these elements work in harmony, or does one dominate the other? Our analysis of a pretrained image diffusion model that integrates gated self-attention into the U-Net reveals that spatial grounding often outweighs textual grounding due to the sequential flow from gated self-attention to cross-attention. We demonstrate that such bias can be significantly mitigated without sacrificing accuracy in either grounding by simply rewiring the network architecture, changing from sequential to parallel for gated self-attention and cross-attention. This surprisingly simple yet effective solution does not require any fine-tuning of the network but significantly reduces the trade-off between the two groundings. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements from the original GLIGEN to the rewired version in the trade-off between textual grounding and spatial grounding.

We propose an effective method for inserting adapters into text-to-image foundation models, which enables the execution of complex downstream tasks while preserving the generalization ability of the base model. The core idea of this method is to optimize the attention mechanism related to 2D feature maps, which enhances the performance of the adapter. This approach was validated on the task of meme video generation and achieved significant results. We hope this work can provide insights for post-training tasks of large text-to-image models. Additionally, as this method demonstrates good compatibility with SD1.5 derivative models, it holds certain value for the open-source community. Therefore, we will release the related code (https://songkey.github.io/hellomeme).

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is significantly sensitive to the contextual position of information in the input. To investigate the mechanism behind this positional bias, our extensive experiments reveal a consistent phenomenon we term the attention basin: when presented with a sequence of structured items (e.g., retrieved documents or few-shot examples), models systematically assign higher attention to the items at the beginning and end of the sequence, while neglecting those in the middle. Crucially, our analysis further reveals that allocating higher attention to critical information is key to enhancing model performance. Based on these insights, we introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank), a two-stage framework that (i) estimates a model's intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set, and (ii) reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. AttnRank is a model-agnostic, training-free, and plug-and-play method with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks demonstrate that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures.

Recent advances in large language models highlighted the excessive quadratic cost of self-attention. Despite the significant research efforts, subquadratic attention methods still suffer from inferior performance in practice. We hypothesize that dynamic, learned content-based sparsity can lead to more efficient attention mechanisms. We present Mixture of Sparse Attention (MoSA), a novel approach inspired by Mixture of Experts (MoE) with expert choice routing. MoSA dynamically selects tokens for each attention head, allowing arbitrary sparse attention patterns. By selecting k tokens from a sequence of length T, MoSA reduces the computational complexity of each attention head from O(T^2) to O(k^2 + T). This enables using more heads within the same computational budget, allowing higher specialization. We show that among the tested sparse attention variants, MoSA is the only one that can outperform the dense baseline, sometimes with up to 27% better perplexity for an identical compute budget. MoSA can also reduce the resource usage compared to dense self-attention. Despite using torch implementation without an optimized kernel, perplexity-matched MoSA models are simultaneously faster in wall-clock time, require less memory for training, and drastically reduce the size of the KV-cache compared to the dense transformer baselines.

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel attention paradigm, Agent Attention, to strike a favorable balance between computational efficiency and representation power. Specifically, the Agent Attention, denoted as a quadruple (Q, A, K, V), introduces an additional set of agent tokens A into the conventional attention module. The agent tokens first act as the agent for the query tokens Q to aggregate information from K and V, and then broadcast the information back to Q. Given the number of agent tokens can be designed to be much smaller than the number of query tokens, the agent attention is significantly more efficient than the widely adopted Softmax attention, while preserving global context modelling capability. Interestingly, we show that the proposed agent attention is equivalent to a generalized form of linear attention. Therefore, agent attention seamlessly integrates the powerful Softmax attention and the highly efficient linear attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of agent attention with various vision Transformers and across diverse vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and image generation. Notably, agent attention has shown remarkable performance in high-resolution scenarios, owning to its linear attention nature. For instance, when applied to Stable Diffusion, our agent attention accelerates generation and substantially enhances image generation quality without any additional training. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Agent-Attention.

The Attention mechanism is the main component of the Transformer architecture, and since its introduction, it has led to significant advancements in Deep Learning that span many domains and multiple tasks. The Attention Mechanism was utilized in Computer Vision as the Vision Transformer ViT, and its usage has expanded into many tasks in the vision domain, such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and image generation. While this mechanism is very expressive and capable, it comes with the drawback of being computationally expensive and requiring datasets of considerable size for effective optimization. To address these shortcomings, many designs have been proposed in the literature to reduce the computational burden and alleviate the data size requirements. Examples of such attempts in the vision domain are the MLP-Mixer, the Conv-Mixer, the Perciver-IO, and many more. This paper introduces a new computational block as an alternative to the standard ViT block that reduces the compute burdens by replacing the normal Attention layers with a Network in Network structure that enhances the static approach of the MLP Mixer with a dynamic system of learning an element-wise gating function by a token mixing process. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed design provides better performance than the baseline architectures on multiple datasets applied in the image classification task of the vision domain.

We present an attention mechanism inspired from definition of screened Coulomb potential. This attention mechanism was used to interpret the Graph Attention (GAT) model layers and training dataset by using a flexible and scalable framework (CoulGAT) developed for this purpose. Using CoulGAT, a forest of plain and resnet models were trained and characterized using this attention mechanism against CHAMPS dataset. The learnable variables of the attention mechanism are used to extract node-node and node-feature interactions to define an empirical standard model for the graph structure and hidden layer. This representation of graph and hidden layers can be used as a tool to compare different models, optimize hidden layers and extract a compact definition of graph structure of the dataset.

With the unprecedented performance being achieved by text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, T2I customization further empowers users to tailor the diffusion model to new concepts absent in the pre-training dataset, termed subject-driven generation. Moreover, extracting several new concepts from a single image enables the model to learn multiple concepts, and simultaneously decreases the difficulties of training data preparation, urging the disentanglement of multiple concepts to be a new challenge. However, existing models for disentanglement commonly require pre-determined masks or retain background elements. To this end, we propose an attention-guided method, AttenCraft, for multiple concept disentanglement. In particular, our method leverages self-attention and cross-attention maps to create accurate masks for each concept within a single initialization step, omitting any required mask preparation by humans or other models. The created masks are then applied to guide the cross-attention activation of each target concept during training and achieve concept disentanglement. Additionally, we introduce Uniform sampling and Reweighted sampling schemes to alleviate the non-synchronicity of feature acquisition from different concepts, and improve generation quality. Our method outperforms baseline models in terms of image-alignment, and behaves comparably on text-alignment. Finally, we showcase the applicability of AttenCraft to more complicated settings, such as an input image containing three concepts. The project is available at https://github.com/junjie-shentu/AttenCraft.

Text-to-image diffusion models have an unprecedented ability to generate diverse and high-quality images. However, they often struggle to faithfully capture the intended semantics of complex input prompts that include multiple subjects. Recently, numerous layout-to-image extensions have been introduced to improve user control, aiming to localize subjects represented by specific tokens. Yet, these methods often produce semantically inaccurate images, especially when dealing with multiple semantically or visually similar subjects. In this work, we study and analyze the causes of these limitations. Our exploration reveals that the primary issue stems from inadvertent semantic leakage between subjects in the denoising process. This leakage is attributed to the diffusion model's attention layers, which tend to blend the visual features of different subjects. To address these issues, we introduce Bounded Attention, a training-free method for bounding the information flow in the sampling process. Bounded Attention prevents detrimental leakage among subjects and enables guiding the generation to promote each subject's individuality, even with complex multi-subject conditioning. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method empowers the generation of multiple subjects that better align with given prompts and layouts.

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address this limitation, recent research has introduced two principal categories of efficient attention mechanisms. Linear attention methods achieve linear complexity through kernel approximations, recurrent formulations, or fastweight dynamics, thereby enabling scalable inference with reduced computational overhead. Sparse attention techniques, in contrast, limit attention computation to selected subsets of tokens based on fixed patterns, block-wise routing, or clustering strategies, enhancing efficiency while preserving contextual coverage. This survey provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of these developments, integrating both algorithmic innovations and hardware-level considerations. In addition, we analyze the incorporation of efficient attention into largescale pre-trained language models, including both architectures built entirely on efficient attention and hybrid designs that combine local and global components. By aligning theoretical foundations with practical deployment strategies, this work aims to serve as a foundational reference for advancing the design of scalable and efficient language models.

This paper presents Video-P2P, a novel framework for real-world video editing with cross-attention control. While attention control has proven effective for image editing with pre-trained image generation models, there are currently no large-scale video generation models publicly available. Video-P2P addresses this limitation by adapting an image generation diffusion model to complete various video editing tasks. Specifically, we propose to first tune a Text-to-Set (T2S) model to complete an approximate inversion and then optimize a shared unconditional embedding to achieve accurate video inversion with a small memory cost. For attention control, we introduce a novel decoupled-guidance strategy, which uses different guidance strategies for the source and target prompts. The optimized unconditional embedding for the source prompt improves reconstruction ability, while an initialized unconditional embedding for the target prompt enhances editability. Incorporating the attention maps of these two branches enables detailed editing. These technical designs enable various text-driven editing applications, including word swap, prompt refinement, and attention re-weighting. Video-P2P works well on real-world videos for generating new characters while optimally preserving their original poses and scenes. It significantly outperforms previous approaches.

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This limitation poses a substantial obstacle when dealing with long documents or high-resolution images. In this work, we study the self-attention mechanism by analyzing the distribution of the attention matrix and its concentration ability. Furthermore, we propose instruments to measure these quantities and introduce a novel self-attention mechanism, Linear Log-Normal Attention, designed to emulate the distribution and concentration behavior of the original self-attention. Our experimental results on popular natural language benchmarks reveal that our proposed Linear Log-Normal Attention outperforms other linearized attention alternatives, offering a promising avenue for enhancing the scalability of transformer models. Our code is available in supplementary materials.

Training-free diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in generating multi-subject consistent images within open-domain scenarios. The key idea of these methods is to incorporate reference subject information within the attention layer. However, existing methods still obtain suboptimal performance when handling numerous subjects. This paper reveals the two primary issues contributing to this deficiency. Firstly, there is undesired interference among different subjects within the target image. Secondly, tokens tend to reference nearby tokens, which reduces the effectiveness of the attention mechanism when there is a significant positional difference between subjects in reference and target images. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free diffusion model with Isolation and Reposition Attention, named IR-Diffusion. Specifically, Isolation Attention ensures that multiple subjects in the target image do not reference each other, effectively eliminating the subject fusion. On the other hand, Reposition Attention involves scaling and repositioning subjects in both reference and target images to the same position within the images. This ensures that subjects in the target image can better reference those in the reference image, thereby maintaining better consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly enhance multi-subject consistency, outperforming all existing methods in open-domain scenarios.

We present Puppet-Master, an interactive video generative model that can serve as a motion prior for part-level dynamics. At test time, given a single image and a sparse set of motion trajectories (i.e., drags), Puppet-Master can synthesize a video depicting realistic part-level motion faithful to the given drag interactions. This is achieved by fine-tuning a large-scale pre-trained video diffusion model, for which we propose a new conditioning architecture to inject the dragging control effectively. More importantly, we introduce the all-to-first attention mechanism, a drop-in replacement for the widely adopted spatial attention modules, which significantly improves generation quality by addressing the appearance and background issues in existing models. Unlike other motion-conditioned video generators that are trained on in-the-wild videos and mostly move an entire object, Puppet-Master is learned from Objaverse-Animation-HQ, a new dataset of curated part-level motion clips. We propose a strategy to automatically filter out sub-optimal animations and augment the synthetic renderings with meaningful motion trajectories. Puppet-Master generalizes well to real images across various categories and outperforms existing methods in a zero-shot manner on a real-world benchmark. See our project page for more results: vgg-puppetmaster.github.io.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress in integrating large language models (LLMs) with visual inputs, enabling advanced multimodal reasoning. Despite their success, a persistent challenge is hallucination-where generated text fails to accurately reflect visual content-undermining both accuracy and reliability. Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but primarily address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms driving hallucination in LVLMs, with an emphasis on the multi-head attention module. Specifically, we introduce Vision-aware Head Divergence (VHD), a metric that quantifies the sensitivity of attention head outputs to visual context. Based on this, our findings reveal the presence of vision-aware attention heads that are more attuned to visual information; however, the model's overreliance on its prior language patterns is closely related to hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose Vision-aware Head Reinforcement (VHR), a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead.

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to attend heavily to the first token in the sequence -- creating a so-called attention sink. Many works have studied this phenomenon in detail, proposing various ways to either leverage or alleviate it. Attention sinks have been connected to quantisation difficulties, security issues, and streaming attention. Yet, while many works have provided conditions in which they occur or not, a critical question remains shallowly answered: Why do LLMs learn such patterns and how are they being used? In this work, we argue theoretically and empirically that this mechanism provides a method for LLMs to avoid over-mixing, connecting this to existing lines of work that study mathematically how information propagates in Transformers. We conduct experiments to validate our theoretical intuitions and show how choices such as context length, depth, and data packing influence the sink behaviour. We hope that this study provides a new practical perspective on why attention sinks are useful in LLMs, leading to a better understanding of the attention patterns that form during training.

Text-driven video generation witnesses rapid progress. However, merely using text prompts is not enough to depict the desired subject appearance that accurately aligns with users' intents, especially for customized content creation. In this paper, we study the task of video generation with image prompts, which provide more accurate and direct content control beyond the text prompts. Specifically, we propose a feed-forward framework VideoBooth, with two dedicated designs: 1) We propose to embed image prompts in a coarse-to-fine manner. Coarse visual embeddings from image encoder provide high-level encodings of image prompts, while fine visual embeddings from the proposed attention injection module provide multi-scale and detailed encoding of image prompts. These two complementary embeddings can faithfully capture the desired appearance. 2) In the attention injection module at fine level, multi-scale image prompts are fed into different cross-frame attention layers as additional keys and values. This extra spatial information refines the details in the first frame and then it is propagated to the remaining frames, which maintains temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoBooth achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating customized high-quality videos with subjects specified in image prompts. Notably, VideoBooth is a generalizable framework where a single model works for a wide range of image prompts with feed-forward pass.

Recent advancements in video generation have been greatly driven by video diffusion models, with camera motion control emerging as a crucial challenge in creating view-customized visual content. This paper introduces trajectory attention, a novel approach that performs attention along available pixel trajectories for fine-grained camera motion control. Unlike existing methods that often yield imprecise outputs or neglect temporal correlations, our approach possesses a stronger inductive bias that seamlessly injects trajectory information into the video generation process. Importantly, our approach models trajectory attention as an auxiliary branch alongside traditional temporal attention. This design enables the original temporal attention and the trajectory attention to work in synergy, ensuring both precise motion control and new content generation capability, which is critical when the trajectory is only partially available. Experiments on camera motion control for images and videos demonstrate significant improvements in precision and long-range consistency while maintaining high-quality generation. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be extended to other video motion control tasks, such as first-frame-guided video editing, where it excels in maintaining content consistency over large spatial and temporal ranges.

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from computation for efficient inference. Sparse attention inference methods aim to reduce this computational burden; however, they also come with a troublesome performance degradation. We discover that one reason for this degradation is that the sparse calculation induces a distributional shift in the attention outputs. The distributional shift causes decoding-time queries to fail to align well with the appropriate keys from the prefill stage, leading to a drop in performance. We propose a simple, novel, and effective procedure for correcting this distributional shift, bringing the distribution of sparse attention outputs closer to that of quadratic attention. Our method can be applied on top of any sparse attention method, and results in an average 36%pt performance increase, recovering 88% of quadratic attention accuracy on the 131K RULER benchmark when applied on top of sliding window attention with sink tokens while only adding a small overhead. Our method can maintain approximately 98.5% sparsity over full quadratic attention, making our model 32 times faster than Flash Attention 2 when processing 1M token prefills.

Attention heads are one of the building blocks of large language models (LLMs). Prior work on investigating their operation mostly focused on analyzing their behavior during inference for specific circuits or tasks. In this work, we seek a comprehensive mapping of the operations they implement in a model. We propose MAPS (Mapping Attention head ParameterS), an efficient framework that infers the functionality of attention heads from their parameters, without any model training or inference. We showcase the utility of MAPS for answering two types of questions: (a) given a predefined operation, mapping how strongly heads across the model implement it, and (b) given an attention head, inferring its salient functionality. Evaluating MAPS on 20 operations across 6 popular LLMs shows its estimations correlate with the head's outputs during inference and are causally linked to the model's predictions. Moreover, its mappings reveal attention heads of certain operations that were overlooked in previous studies, and valuable insights on function universality and architecture biases in LLMs. Next, we present an automatic pipeline and analysis that leverage MAPS to characterize the salient operations of a given head. Our pipeline produces plausible operation descriptions for most heads, as assessed by human judgment, while revealing diverse operations.

Despite the ability to produce human-level speech for in-domain text, attention-based end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems suffer from text alignment failures that increase in frequency for out-of-domain text. We show that these failures can be addressed using simple location-relative attention mechanisms that do away with content-based query/key comparisons. We compare two families of attention mechanisms: location-relative GMM-based mechanisms and additive energy-based mechanisms. We suggest simple modifications to GMM-based attention that allow it to align quickly and consistently during training, and introduce a new location-relative attention mechanism to the additive energy-based family, called Dynamic Convolution Attention (DCA). We compare the various mechanisms in terms of alignment speed and consistency during training, naturalness, and ability to generalize to long utterances, and conclude that GMM attention and DCA can generalize to very long utterances, while preserving naturalness for shorter, in-domain utterances.

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens gets increasingly mixed. This makes attention weights unreliable as explanations probes. In this paper, we consider the problem of quantifying this flow of information through self-attention. We propose two methods for approximating the attention to input tokens given attention weights, attention rollout and attention flow, as post hoc methods when we use attention weights as the relative relevance of the input tokens. We show that these methods give complementary views on the flow of information, and compared to raw attention, both yield higher correlations with importance scores of input tokens obtained using an ablation method and input gradients.

In standard causal attention, each token's query, key, and value (QKV) are static and encode only preceding context. We introduce CAuSal aTtention with Lookahead kEys (CASTLE), an attention mechanism that continually updates each token's keys as the context unfolds. We term these updated keys lookahead keys because they belong to earlier positions yet integrate information from tokens that appear later relative to those positions, while strictly preserving the autoregressive property. Although the mechanism appears sequential, we derive a mathematical equivalence that avoids explicitly materializing lookahead keys at each position and enables efficient parallel training. On language modeling benchmarks, CASTLE consistently outperforms standard causal attention across model scales, reducing validation perplexity and improving performance on a range of downstream tasks.

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality video generation, but the additional temporal dimension significantly increases computational costs, making training and inference on long videos prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we identify a phenomenon we term Spatiotemporal Energy Decay in video diffusion models: post-softmax attention scores diminish as spatial and temporal distance between tokens increase, akin to the physical decay of signal or waves over space and time in nature. Motivated by this, we propose Radial Attention, a scalable sparse attention mechanism with O(n log n) complexity that translates energy decay into exponentially decaying compute density, which is significantly more efficient than standard O(n^2) dense attention and more expressive than linear attention. Specifically, Radial Attention employs a simple, static attention mask where each token attends to spatially nearby tokens, with the attention window size shrinking with temporal distance. Moreover, it allows pre-trained video diffusion models to extend their generation length with efficient LoRA-based fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that Radial Attention maintains video quality across Wan2.1-14B, HunyuanVideo, and Mochi 1, achieving up to a 1.9times speedup over the original dense attention. With minimal tuning, it enables video generation up to 4times longer while reducing training costs by up to 4.4times compared to direct fine-tuning and accelerating inference by up to 3.7times compared to dense attention inference.

Transformers are a widespread and successful model architecture, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). The essential innovation of this architecture is the Attention Mechanism, which solves the problem of extracting relevant context information from long sequences in NLP and realistic scenes in CV. A classical neural network component, a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), complements the attention mechanism. Its necessity is frequently justified by its capability of modeling nonlinear relationships. However, the attention mechanism itself is nonlinear through its internal use of similarity measures. A possible hypothesis is that this nonlinearity is sufficient for modeling typical application problems. As the MLPs usually contain the most trainable parameters of the whole model, their omission would substantially reduce the parameter set size. Further components can also be reorganized to reduce the number of parameters. Under some conditions, query and key matrices can be collapsed into a single matrix of the same size. The same is true about value and projection matrices, which can also be omitted without eliminating the substance of the attention mechanism. Initially, the similarity measure was defined asymmetrically, with peculiar properties such as that a token is possibly dissimilar to itself. A possible symmetric definition requires only half of the parameters. We have laid the groundwork by testing widespread CV benchmarks: MNIST and CIFAR-10. The tests have shown that simplified transformer architectures (a) without MLP, (b) with collapsed matrices, and (c) symmetric similarity matrices exhibit similar performance as the original architecture, saving up to 90% of parameters without hurting the classification performance.

Multi-Agent System (MAS) powered by Visual Language Models (VLMs) enables challenging tasks but suffers from a novel failure term, multi-agent visual hallucination snowballing, where hallucinations are seeded in a single agent and amplified by following ones due to the over-reliance on textual flow to relay visual information. Through turn-, layer-, and token-wise attention analyses, we provide detailed insights into the essence of hallucination snowballing regarding the reduction of visual attention allocation. It leads us to identify a subset of vision tokens with a unimodal attention peak in middle layers that best preserve visual evidence but gradually diminish in deeper agent turns, resulting in the visual hallucination snowballing in MAS. Thus, we propose ViF, a lightweight, plug-and-play mitigation paradigm that relays inter-agent messages with Visual Flow powered by the selected visual relay tokens and applies attention reallocation to amplify this pattern. The experiment results demonstrate that our method markedly reduces hallucination snowballing, consistently improving the performance across eight benchmarks based on four common MAS structures and ten base models. The source code will be available at: https://github.com/YU-deep/ViF.git.

The integration of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) in Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) has significantly enhanced text-to-image generation quality. However, the fundamental reliance of self-attention layers on positional embedding versus query-key similarity during generation remains an intriguing question. We present the first mechanistic analysis of RoPE-based MMDiT models (e.g., FLUX), introducing an automated probing strategy that disentangles positional information versus content dependencies by strategically manipulating RoPE during generation. Our analysis reveals distinct dependency patterns that do not straightforwardly correlate with depth, offering new insights into the layer-specific roles in RoPE-based MMDiT. Based on these findings, we propose a training-free, task-specific image editing framework that categorizes editing tasks into three types: position-dependent editing (e.g., object addition), content similarity-dependent editing (e.g., non-rigid editing), and region-preserved editing (e.g., background replacement). For each type, we design tailored key-value injection strategies based on the characteristics of the editing task. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in preserving original semantic content and achieving seamless modifications.

Attention mechanism has been crucial for image diffusion models, however, their quadratic computational complexity limits the sizes of images we can process within reasonable time and memory constraints. This paper investigates the importance of dense attention in generative image models, which often contain redundant features, making them suitable for sparser attention mechanisms. We propose a novel training-free method ToDo that relies on token downsampling of key and value tokens to accelerate Stable Diffusion inference by up to 2x for common sizes and up to 4.5x or more for high resolutions like 2048x2048. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods in balancing efficient throughput and fidelity.

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token interactions within sequences through the utilization of softmax function. Conversely, linear attention presents a more computationally efficient alternative by approximating the softmax operation with linear complexity. However, it exhibits substantial performance degradation when compared to the traditional softmax attention mechanism. In this paper, we bridge the gap in our theoretical understanding of the reasons behind the practical performance gap between softmax and linear attention. By conducting a comprehensive comparative analysis of these two attention mechanisms, we shed light on the underlying reasons for why softmax attention outperforms linear attention in most scenarios.

Zero-shot customized video generation has gained significant attention due to its substantial application potential. Existing methods rely on additional models to extract and inject reference subject features, assuming that the Video Diffusion Model (VDM) alone is insufficient for zero-shot customized video generation. However, these methods often struggle to maintain consistent subject appearance due to suboptimal feature extraction and injection techniques. In this paper, we reveal that VDM inherently possesses the force to extract and inject subject features. Departing from previous heuristic approaches, we introduce a novel framework that leverages VDM's inherent force to enable high-quality zero-shot customized video generation. Specifically, for feature extraction, we directly input reference images into VDM and use its intrinsic feature extraction process, which not only provides fine-grained features but also significantly aligns with VDM's pre-trained knowledge. For feature injection, we devise an innovative bidirectional interaction between subject features and generated content through spatial self-attention within VDM, ensuring that VDM has better subject fidelity while maintaining the diversity of the generated video.Experiments on both customized human and object video generation validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Conditional diffusion models can create unseen images in various settings, aiding image interpolation. Interpolation in latent spaces is well-studied, but interpolation with specific conditions like text or poses is less understood. Simple approaches, such as linear interpolation in the space of conditions, often result in images that lack consistency, smoothness, and fidelity. To that end, we introduce a novel training-free technique named Attention Interpolation via Diffusion (AID). Our key contributions include 1) proposing an inner/outer interpolated attention layer; 2) fusing the interpolated attention with self-attention to boost fidelity; and 3) applying beta distribution to selection to increase smoothness. We also present a variant, Prompt-guided Attention Interpolation via Diffusion (PAID), that considers interpolation as a condition-dependent generative process. This method enables the creation of new images with greater consistency, smoothness, and efficiency, and offers control over the exact path of interpolation. Our approach demonstrates effectiveness for conceptual and spatial interpolation. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/QY-H00/attention-interpolation-diffusion.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for incorporating external knowledge in Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We propose the integration of lexicon features into the self-attention mechanism of RNN-based architectures. This form of conditioning on the attention distribution, enforces the contribution of the most salient words for the task at hand. We introduce three methods, namely attentional concatenation, feature-based gating and affine transformation. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our methods. Attentional feature-based gating yields consistent performance improvement across tasks. Our approach is implemented as a simple add-on module for RNN-based models with minimal computational overhead and can be adapted to any deep neural architecture.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and describing visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various vision-language tasks. However, these models frequently exhibit hallucination behavior, where they generate descriptions containing objects or details absent in the input image. Our work investigates this phenomenon by analyzing attention patterns across transformer layers and heads, revealing that hallucinations often stem from progressive degradation of visual grounding in deeper layers. We propose a novel attention modification approach that combines selective token emphasis and head-specific modulation to maintain visual grounding throughout the generation process. Our method introduces two key components: (1) a dual-stream token selection mechanism that identifies and prioritizes both locally informative and spatially significant visual tokens, and (2) an attention head-specific modulation strategy that differentially amplifies visual information processing based on measured visual sensitivity of individual attention heads. Through extensive experimentation on the MSCOCO dataset, we demonstrate that our approach reduces hallucination rates by up to 62.3\% compared to baseline models while maintaining comparable task performance. Our analysis reveals that selectively modulating tokens across attention heads with varying levels of visual sensitivity can significantly improve visual grounding without requiring model retraining.

The quadratic complexity of self-attention limits its applicability and scalability on large unstructured meshes. We introduce Fast Low-rank Attention Routing Engine (FLARE), a linear complexity self-attention mechanism that routes attention through fixed-length latent sequences. Each attention head performs global communication among N tokens by projecting the input sequence onto a fixed length latent sequence of M ll N tokens using learnable query tokens. By routing attention through a bottleneck sequence, FLARE learns a low-rank form of attention that can be applied at O(NM) cost. FLARE not only scales to unprecedented problem sizes, but also delivers superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art neural PDE surrogates across diverse benchmarks. We also release a new additive manufacturing dataset to spur further research. Our code is available at https://github.com/vpuri3/FLARE.py.

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model by showing how the model assigns weight to different input elements. However, the multi-layer, multi-head attention mechanism in the Transformer model can be difficult to decipher. To make the model more accessible, we introduce an open-source tool that visualizes attention at multiple scales, each of which provides a unique perspective on the attention mechanism. We demonstrate the tool on BERT and OpenAI GPT-2 and present three example use cases: detecting model bias, locating relevant attention heads, and linking neurons to model behavior.

Attention has become more attractive in person reidentification (ReID) as it is capable of biasing the allocation of available resources towards the most informative parts of an input signal. However, state-of-the-art works concentrate only on coarse or first-order attention design, e.g. spatial and channels attention, while rarely exploring higher-order attention mechanism. We take a step towards addressing this problem. In this paper, we first propose the High-Order Attention (HOA) module to model and utilize the complex and high-order statistics information in attention mechanism, so as to capture the subtle differences among pedestrians and to produce the discriminative attention proposals. Then, rethinking person ReID as a zero-shot learning problem, we propose the Mixed High-Order Attention Network (MHN) to further enhance the discrimination and richness of attention knowledge in an explicit manner. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of our MHN for person ReID over a wide variety of state-of-the-art methods on three large-scale datasets, including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-ReID and CUHK03-NP. Code is available at http://www.bhchen.cn/.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in fine-tuning-as-a-service (FTaaS) settings, where user-submitted datasets adapt general-purpose models to downstream tasks. This flexibility, however, introduces serious security risks, as malicious fine-tuning can implant backdoors into MLLMs with minimal effort. In this paper, we observe that backdoor triggers systematically disrupt cross-modal processing by causing abnormal attention concentration on non-semantic regions--a phenomenon we term attention collapse. Based on this insight, we propose Believe Your Eyes (BYE), a data filtering framework that leverages attention entropy patterns as self-supervised signals to identify and filter backdoor samples. BYE operates via a three-stage pipeline: (1) extracting attention maps using the fine-tuned model, (2) computing entropy scores and profiling sensitive layers via bimodal separation, and (3) performing unsupervised clustering to remove suspicious samples. Unlike prior defenses, BYE equires no clean supervision, auxiliary labels, or model modifications. Extensive experiments across various datasets, models, and diverse trigger types validate BYE's effectiveness: it achieves near-zero attack success rates while maintaining clean-task performance, offering a robust and generalizable solution against backdoor threats in MLLMs.

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads that control the overall attention of the LLM. Then, we demonstrate that distraction arises when contextual heads fail to allocate sufficient attention to relevant contexts and can be mitigated by increasing attention to these contexts. We further identify focus directions, located at the key and query activations of these heads, which enable them to allocate more attention to relevant contexts without explicitly specifying which context is relevant. We comprehensively evaluate the effect of focus direction on various long-context tasks and find out focus directions could help to mitigate the poor task alignment of the long-context LLMs. We believe our findings could promote further research on long-context LLM alignment.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become a leading architecture in image generation. However, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, which are responsible for modeling token-wise relationships, results in significant latency when generating high-resolution images. To address this issue, we aim at a linear attention mechanism in this paper that reduces the complexity of pre-trained DiTs to linear. We begin our exploration with a comprehensive summary of existing efficient attention mechanisms and identify four key factors crucial for successful linearization of pre-trained DiTs: locality, formulation consistency, high-rank attention maps, and feature integrity. Based on these insights, we introduce a convolution-like local attention strategy termed CLEAR, which limits feature interactions to a local window around each query token, and thus achieves linear complexity. Our experiments indicate that, by fine-tuning the attention layer on merely 10K self-generated samples for 10K iterations, we can effectively transfer knowledge from a pre-trained DiT to a student model with linear complexity, yielding results comparable to the teacher model. Simultaneously, it reduces attention computations by 99.5% and accelerates generation by 6.3 times for generating 8K-resolution images. Furthermore, we investigate favorable properties in the distilled attention layers, such as zero-shot generalization cross various models and plugins, and improved support for multi-GPU parallel inference. Models and codes are available here: https://github.com/Huage001/CLEAR.

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance through test-time scaling but incur substantial computational overhead, particularly from excessive token generation when processing short input prompts. While sparse attention mechanisms can reduce latency and memory usage, existing approaches suffer from significant accuracy degradation due to accumulated errors during long-generation reasoning. These methods generally require either high token retention rates or expensive retraining. We introduce LessIsMore, a training-free sparse attention mechanism for reasoning tasks, which leverages global attention patterns rather than relying on traditional head-specific local optimizations. LessIsMore aggregates token selections from local attention heads with recent contextual information, enabling unified cross-head token ranking for future decoding layers. This unified selection improves generalization and efficiency by avoiding the need to maintain separate token subsets per head. Evaluation across diverse reasoning tasks and benchmarks shows that LessIsMore preserves -- and in some cases improves -- accuracy while achieving a 1.1times average decoding speed-up compared to full attention. Moreover, LessIsMore attends to 2times fewer tokens without accuracy loss, achieving a 1.13times end-to-end speed-up compared to existing sparse attention methods.

We present a target-aware video diffusion model that generates videos from an input image in which an actor interacts with a specified target while performing a desired action. The target is defined by a segmentation mask and the desired action is described via a text prompt. Unlike existing controllable image-to-video diffusion models that often rely on dense structural or motion cues to guide the actor's movements toward the target, our target-aware model requires only a simple mask to indicate the target, leveraging the generalization capabilities of pretrained models to produce plausible actions. This makes our method particularly effective for human-object interaction (HOI) scenarios, where providing precise action guidance is challenging, and further enables the use of video diffusion models for high-level action planning in applications such as robotics. We build our target-aware model by extending a baseline model to incorporate the target mask as an additional input. To enforce target awareness, we introduce a special token that encodes the target's spatial information within the text prompt. We then fine-tune the model with our curated dataset using a novel cross-attention loss that aligns the cross-attention maps associated with this token with the input target mask. To further improve performance, we selectively apply this loss to the most semantically relevant transformer blocks and attention regions. Experimental results show that our target-aware model outperforms existing solutions in generating videos where actors interact accurately with the specified targets. We further demonstrate its efficacy in two downstream applications: video content creation and zero-shot 3D HOI motion synthesis.

Many sparse attention mechanisms such as Neighborhood Attention have typically failed to consistently deliver speedup over the self attention baseline. This is largely due to the level of complexity in attention infrastructure, and the rapid evolution of AI hardware architecture. At the same time, many state-of-the-art foundational models, particularly in computer vision, are heavily bound by attention, and need reliable sparsity to escape the O(n^2) complexity. In this paper, we study a class of promising sparse attention mechanisms that focus on locality, and aim to develop a better analytical model of their performance improvements. We first introduce Generalized Neighborhood Attention (GNA), which can describe sliding window, strided sliding window, and blocked attention. We then consider possible design choices in implementing these approaches, and create a simulator that can provide much more realistic speedup upper bounds for any given setting. Finally, we implement GNA on top of a state-of-the-art fused multi-headed attention (FMHA) kernel designed for the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in CUTLASS. Our implementation can fully realize the maximum speedup theoretically possible in many perfectly block-sparse cases, and achieves an effective utilization of 1.3 petaFLOPs/second in FP16. In addition, we plug various GNA configurations into off-the-shelf generative models, such as Cosmos-7B, HunyuanVideo, and FLUX, and show that it can deliver 28% to 46% end-to-end speedup on B200 without any fine-tuning. We will open source our simulator and Blackwell kernels directly through the NATTEN project.

We present SPAD, a novel approach for creating consistent multi-view images from text prompts or single images. To enable multi-view generation, we repurpose a pretrained 2D diffusion model by extending its self-attention layers with cross-view interactions, and fine-tune it on a high quality subset of Objaverse. We find that a naive extension of the self-attention proposed in prior work (e.g. MVDream) leads to content copying between views. Therefore, we explicitly constrain the cross-view attention based on epipolar geometry. To further enhance 3D consistency, we utilize Plucker coordinates derived from camera rays and inject them as positional encoding. This enables SPAD to reason over spatial proximity in 3D well. In contrast to recent works that can only generate views at fixed azimuth and elevation, SPAD offers full camera control and achieves state-of-the-art results in novel view synthesis on unseen objects from the Objaverse and Google Scanned Objects datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that text-to-3D generation using SPAD prevents the multi-face Janus issue. See more details at our webpage: https://yashkant.github.io/spad

Current multi-subject customization approaches encounter two critical challenges: the difficulty in acquiring diverse multi-subject training data, and attribute entanglement across different subjects. To bridge these gaps, we propose MUSAR - a simple yet effective framework to achieve robust multi-subject customization while requiring only single-subject training data. Firstly, to break the data limitation, we introduce debiased diptych learning. It constructs diptych training pairs from single-subject images to facilitate multi-subject learning, while actively correcting the distribution bias introduced by diptych construction via static attention routing and dual-branch LoRA. Secondly, to eliminate cross-subject entanglement, we introduce dynamic attention routing mechanism, which adaptively establishes bijective mappings between generated images and conditional subjects. This design not only achieves decoupling of multi-subject representations but also maintains scalable generalization performance with increasing reference subjects. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our MUSAR outperforms existing methods - even those trained on multi-subject dataset - in image quality, subject consistency, and interaction naturalness, despite requiring only single-subject dataset.

Text-guided image editing aims to modify specific regions of an image according to natural language instructions while maintaining the general structure and the background fidelity. Existing methods utilize masks derived from cross-attention maps generated from diffusion models to identify the target regions for modification. However, since cross-attention mechanisms focus on semantic relevance, they struggle to maintain the image integrity. As a result, these methods often lack spatial consistency, leading to editing artifacts and distortions. In this work, we address these limitations and introduce LOCATEdit, which enhances cross-attention maps through a graph-based approach utilizing self-attention-derived patch relationships to maintain smooth, coherent attention across image regions, ensuring that alterations are limited to the designated items while retaining the surrounding structure. \method consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines on PIE-Bench, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance and effectiveness on various editing tasks. Code can be found on https://github.com/LOCATEdit/LOCATEdit/

With the growing accessibility and wide adoption of large language models, concerns about their safety and alignment with human values have become paramount. In this paper, we identify a concerning phenomenon: Reasoning-Induced Misalignment (RIM), in which misalignment emerges when reasoning capabilities strengthened-particularly when specific types of reasoning patterns are introduced during inference or training. Beyond reporting this vulnerability, we provide the first mechanistic account of its origins. Through representation analysis, we discover that specific attention heads facilitate refusal by reducing their attention to CoT tokens, a mechanism that modulates the model's rationalization process during inference. During training, we find significantly higher activation entanglement between reasoning and safety in safety-critical neurons than in control neurons, particularly after fine-tuning with those identified reasoning patterns. This entanglement strongly correlates with catastrophic forgetting, providing a neuron-level explanation for RIM.

This paper proposes joint attention estimation in a single image. Different from related work in which only the gaze-related attributes of people are independently employed, (I) their locations and actions are also employed as contextual cues for weighting their attributes, and (ii) interactions among all of these attributes are explicitly modeled in our method. For the interaction modeling, we propose a novel Transformer-based attention network to encode joint attention as low-dimensional features. We introduce a specialized MLP head with positional embedding to the Transformer so that it predicts pixelwise confidence of joint attention for generating the confidence heatmap. This pixelwise prediction improves the heatmap accuracy by avoiding the ill-posed problem in which the high-dimensional heatmap is predicted from the low-dimensional features. The estimated joint attention is further improved by being integrated with general image-based attention estimation. Our method outperforms SOTA methods quantitatively in comparative experiments. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/anonymized_codes-ECA4.

Understanding the mechanisms underlying human attention is a fundamental challenge for both vision science and artificial intelligence. While numerous computational models of free-viewing have been proposed, less is known about the mechanisms underlying task-driven image exploration. To address this gap, we present CapMIT1003, a database of captions and click-contingent image explorations collected during captioning tasks. CapMIT1003 is based on the same stimuli from the well-known MIT1003 benchmark, for which eye-tracking data under free-viewing conditions is available, which offers a promising opportunity to concurrently study human attention under both tasks. We make this dataset publicly available to facilitate future research in this field. In addition, we introduce NevaClip, a novel zero-shot method for predicting visual scanpaths that combines contrastive language-image pretrained (CLIP) models with biologically-inspired neural visual attention (NeVA) algorithms. NevaClip simulates human scanpaths by aligning the representation of the foveated visual stimulus and the representation of the associated caption, employing gradient-driven visual exploration to generate scanpaths. Our experimental results demonstrate that NevaClip outperforms existing unsupervised computational models of human visual attention in terms of scanpath plausibility, for both captioning and free-viewing tasks. Furthermore, we show that conditioning NevaClip with incorrect or misleading captions leads to random behavior, highlighting the significant impact of caption guidance in the decision-making process. These findings contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms that guide human attention and pave the way for more sophisticated computational approaches to scanpath prediction that can integrate direct top-down guidance of downstream tasks.

We present a training-free framework for style-personalized image generation that controls content and style information during inference using a scale-wise autoregressive model. Our method employs a three-path design--content, style, and generation--each guided by a corresponding text prompt, enabling flexible and efficient control over image semantics without any additional training. A central contribution of this work is a step-wise and attention-wise intervention analysis. Through systematic prompt and feature injection, we find that early-to-middle generation steps play a pivotal role in shaping both content and style, and that query features predominantly encode content-specific information. Guided by these insights, we introduce two targeted mechanisms: Key Stage Attention Sharing, which aligns content and style during the semantically critical steps, and Adaptive Query Sharing, which reinforces content semantics in later steps through similarity-aware query blending. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive style fidelity and prompt fidelity compared to fine-tuned baselines, while offering faster inference and greater deployment flexibility.

Text-driven video editing aims to modify video content according to natural language instructions. While recent training-free approaches have made progress by leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, they typically rely on inversion-based techniques that map input videos into the latent space, which often leads to temporal inconsistencies and degraded structural fidelity. To address this, we propose FlowDirector, a novel inversion-free video editing framework. Our framework models the editing process as a direct evolution in data space, guiding the video via an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to smoothly transition along its inherent spatiotemporal manifold, thereby preserving temporal coherence and structural details. To achieve localized and controllable edits, we introduce an attention-guided masking mechanism that modulates the ODE velocity field, preserving non-target regions both spatially and temporally. Furthermore, to address incomplete edits and enhance semantic alignment with editing instructions, we present a guidance-enhanced editing strategy inspired by Classifier-Free Guidance, which leverages differential signals between multiple candidate flows to steer the editing trajectory toward stronger semantic alignment without compromising structural consistency. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that FlowDirector achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction adherence, temporal consistency, and background preservation, establishing a new paradigm for efficient and coherent video editing without inversion.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have spurred interest in personalized human image generation, which aims to create novel images featuring specific human identities as reference images indicate. Although existing methods achieve high-fidelity identity preservation, they often struggle with limited multi-ID usability and inadequate facial editability. We present DynamicID, a tuning-free framework supported by a dual-stage training paradigm that inherently facilitates both single-ID and multi-ID personalized generation with high fidelity and flexible facial editability. Our key innovations include: 1) Semantic-Activated Attention (SAA), which employs query-level activation gating to minimize disruption to the original model when injecting ID features and achieve multi-ID personalization without requiring multi-ID samples during training. 2) Identity-Motion Reconfigurator (IMR), which leverages contrastive learning to effectively disentangle and re-entangle facial motion and identity features, thereby enabling flexible facial editing. Additionally, we have developed a curated VariFace-10k facial dataset, comprising 10k unique individuals, each represented by 35 distinct facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that DynamicID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity fidelity, facial editability, and multi-ID personalization capability.

Subject-driven generation is a critical task in creative AI; yet current state-of-the-art methods present a stark trade-off. They either rely on computationally expensive, per-subject fine-tuning, sacrificing efficiency and zero-shot capability, or employ feed-forward architectures built on diffusion models, which are inherently plagued by slow inference speeds. Visual Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are renowned for their rapid sampling speeds and strong generative quality, making them an ideal yet underexplored foundation for resolving this tension. To bridge this gap, we introduce EchoGen, a pioneering framework that empowers VAR models with subject-driven generation capabilities. The core design of EchoGen is an effective dual-path injection strategy that disentangles a subject's high-level semantic identity from its low-level fine-grained details, enabling enhanced controllability and fidelity. We employ a semantic encoder to extract the subject's abstract identity, which is injected through decoupled cross-attention to guide the overall composition. Concurrently, a content encoder captures intricate visual details, which are integrated via a multi-modal attention mechanism to ensure high-fidelity texture and structural preservation. To the best of our knowledge, EchoGen is the first feed-forward subject-driven framework built upon VAR models. Both quantitative and qualitative results substantiate our design, demonstrating that EchoGen achieves subject fidelity and image quality comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods with significantly lower sampling latency. Code and models will be released soon.

The attention mechanism, a cornerstone of state-of-the-art neural models, faces computational hurdles in processing long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Consequently, research efforts in the last few years focused on finding more efficient alternatives. Among them, Hyena (Poli et al., 2023) stands out for achieving competitive results in both language modeling and image classification, while offering sub-quadratic memory and computational complexity. Building on these promising results, we propose ConfHyena, a Conformer whose encoder self-attentions are replaced with an adaptation of Hyena for speech processing, where the long input sequences cause high computational costs. Through experiments in automatic speech recognition (for English) and translation (from English into 8 target languages), we show that our best ConfHyena model significantly reduces the training time by 27%, at the cost of minimal quality degradation (~1%), which, in most cases, is not statistically significant.

Controllable person image generation aims to generate a person image conditioned on reference images, allowing precise control over the person's appearance or pose. However, prior methods often distort fine-grained textural details from the reference image, despite achieving high overall image quality. We attribute these distortions to inadequate attention to corresponding regions in the reference image. To address this, we thereby propose learning flow fields in attention (Leffa), which explicitly guides the target query to attend to the correct reference key in the attention layer during training. Specifically, it is realized via a regularization loss on top of the attention map within a diffusion-based baseline. Our extensive experiments show that Leffa achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling appearance (virtual try-on) and pose (pose transfer), significantly reducing fine-grained detail distortion while maintaining high image quality. Additionally, we show that our loss is model-agnostic and can be used to improve the performance of other diffusion models.

Recent advancements in controllable human image generation have led to zero-shot generation using structural signals (e.g., pose, depth) or facial appearance. Yet, generating human images conditioned on multiple parts of human appearance remains challenging. Addressing this, we introduce Parts2Whole, a novel framework designed for generating customized portraits from multiple reference images, including pose images and various aspects of human appearance. To achieve this, we first develop a semantic-aware appearance encoder to retain details of different human parts, which processes each image based on its textual label to a series of multi-scale feature maps rather than one image token, preserving the image dimension. Second, our framework supports multi-image conditioned generation through a shared self-attention mechanism that operates across reference and target features during the diffusion process. We enhance the vanilla attention mechanism by incorporating mask information from the reference human images, allowing for the precise selection of any part. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing alternatives, offering advanced capabilities for multi-part controllable human image customization. See our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/Parts2Whole/.

Language Models (LMs) often encounter knowledge conflicts when parametric memory contradicts contextual knowledge. Previous works attribute this conflict to the interplay between "memory heads" and "context heads", attention heads assumed to promote either memory or context exclusively. In this study, we go beyond this fundamental assumption by uncovering a critical phenomenon we term the "superposition of contextual information and parametric memory", where highly influential attention heads could simultaneously contribute to both memory and context. Building upon this insight, we propose Just Run Twice (JUICE), a test-time attention intervention method that steers LMs toward either parametric beliefs or contextual knowledge without requiring fine-tuning. JUICE identifies a set of reliable attention heads and leverages a dual-run approach to mitigate the superposition effects. Extensive experiments across 11 datasets and 6 model architectures demonstrate that JUICE sets the new state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization, achieving significant and consistent improvement across different domains under various conflict types. Finally, we theoretically analyze knowledge conflict and the superposition of contextual information and parametric memory in attention heads, which further elucidates the effectiveness of JUICE in these settings.

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from context faithfulness hallucinations, where outputs deviate from retrieved information due to insufficient context utilization and high output uncertainty. Our uncertainty evaluation experiments reveal a strong correlation between high uncertainty and hallucinations. We hypothesize that attention mechanisms encode signals indicative of contextual utilization, validated through probing analysis. Based on these insights, we propose Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding (DAGCD), a lightweight framework that integrates attention distributions and uncertainty signals in a single-pass decoding process. Experiments across QA datasets demonstrate DAGCD's effectiveness, achieving significant improvements in faithfulness and robustness while maintaining computational efficiency.

Cross-attention is a core mechanism in encoder-decoder architectures, widespread in many fields, including speech-to-text (S2T) processing. Its scores have been repurposed for various downstream applications--such as timestamp estimation and audio-text alignment--under the assumption that they reflect the dependencies between input speech representation and the generated text. While the explanatory nature of attention mechanisms has been widely debated in the broader NLP literature, this assumption remains largely unexplored within the speech domain. To address this gap, we assess the explanatory power of cross-attention in S2T models by comparing its scores to input saliency maps derived from feature attribution. Our analysis spans monolingual and multilingual, single-task and multi-task models at multiple scales, and shows that attention scores moderately to strongly align with saliency-based explanations, particularly when aggregated across heads and layers. However, it also shows that cross-attention captures only about 50% of the input relevance and, in the best case, only partially reflects how the decoder attends to the encoder's representations--accounting for just 52-75% of the saliency. These findings uncover fundamental limitations in interpreting cross-attention as an explanatory proxy, suggesting that it offers an informative yet incomplete view of the factors driving predictions in S2T models.

Diffusion-based talking head models generate high-quality, photorealistic videos but suffer from slow inference, limiting practical applications. Existing acceleration methods for general diffusion models fail to exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies unique to talking head generation. In this paper, we propose a task-specific framework addressing these inefficiencies through two key innovations. First, we introduce Lightning-fast Caching-based Parallel denoising prediction (LightningCP), caching static features to bypass most model layers in inference time. We also enable parallel prediction using cached features and estimated noisy latents as inputs, efficiently bypassing sequential sampling. Second, we propose Decoupled Foreground Attention (DFA) to further accelerate attention computations, exploiting the spatial decoupling in talking head videos to restrict attention to dynamic foreground regions. Additionally, we remove reference features in certain layers to bring extra speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves inference speed while preserving video quality.

We report the presence of a simple neural mechanism that represents an input-output function as a vector within autoregressive transformer language models (LMs). Using causal mediation analysis on a diverse range of in-context-learning (ICL) tasks, we find that a small number attention heads transport a compact representation of the demonstrated task, which we call a function vector (FV). FVs are robust to changes in context, i.e., they trigger execution of the task on inputs such as zero-shot and natural text settings that do not resemble the ICL contexts from which they are collected. We test FVs across a range of tasks, models, and layers and find strong causal effects across settings in middle layers. We investigate the internal structure of FVs and find while that they often contain information that encodes the output space of the function, this information alone is not sufficient to reconstruct an FV. Finally, we test semantic vector composition in FVs, and find that to some extent they can be summed to create vectors that trigger new complex tasks. Taken together, our findings suggest that LLMs contain internal abstractions of general-purpose functions that can be invoked in a variety of contexts.

The efficiency of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in contexts where computational resources are limited. Traditional attention mechanisms in these models, while powerful, require significant computational and memory resources due to the necessity of recalculating and storing attention weights across different layers. This paper introduces a novel Shared Attention (SA) mechanism, designed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs by directly sharing computed attention weights across multiple layers. Unlike previous methods that focus on sharing intermediate Key-Value (KV) caches, our approach utilizes the isotropic tendencies of attention distributions observed in advanced LLMs post-pretraining to reduce both the computational flops and the size of the KV cache required during inference. We empirically demonstrate that implementing SA across various LLMs results in minimal accuracy loss on standard benchmarks. Our findings suggest that SA not only conserves computational resources but also maintains robust model performance, thereby facilitating the deployment of more efficient LLMs in resource-constrained environments.

Recent advances in video insertion based on diffusion models are impressive. However, existing methods rely on complex control signals but struggle with subject consistency, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we focus on the task of Mask-free Video Insertion and aim to resolve three key challenges: data scarcity, subject-scene equilibrium, and insertion harmonization. To address the data scarcity, we propose a new data pipeline InsertPipe, constructing diverse cross-pair data automatically. Building upon our data pipeline, we develop OmniInsert, a novel unified framework for mask-free video insertion from both single and multiple subject references. Specifically, to maintain subject-scene equilibrium, we introduce a simple yet effective Condition-Specific Feature Injection mechanism to distinctly inject multi-source conditions and propose a novel Progressive Training strategy that enables the model to balance feature injection from subjects and source video. Meanwhile, we design the Subject-Focused Loss to improve the detailed appearance of the subjects. To further enhance insertion harmonization, we propose an Insertive Preference Optimization methodology to optimize the model by simulating human preferences, and incorporate a Context-Aware Rephraser module during reference to seamlessly integrate the subject into the original scenes. To address the lack of a benchmark for the field, we introduce InsertBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse scenes with meticulously selected subjects. Evaluation on InsertBench indicates OmniInsert outperforms state-of-the-art closed-source commercial solutions. The code will be released.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in various real-world scenarios due to their excellent generalization capabilities and robust generative abilities. However, they exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the middle", a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in long-context scenarios, which indicates the placement of the key information in different positions of a prompt can significantly affect accuracy. This paper first explores the micro-level manifestations of position bias, concluding that attention weights are a micro-level expression of position bias. It further identifies that, in addition to position embeddings, causal attention mask also contributes to position bias by creating position-specific hidden states. Based on these insights, we propose a method to mitigate position bias by scaling this positional hidden states. Experiments on the NaturalQuestions Multi-document QA, KV retrieval, LongBench and timeline reorder tasks, using various models including RoPE models, context windowextended models, and Alibi models, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach. Our method can improve performance by up to 15.2% by modifying just one dimension of hidden states. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/PositionalHidden.

Recently, image editing based on Diffusion-in-Transformer models has undergone rapid development. However, existing editing methods often lack effective control over the degree of editing, limiting their ability to achieve more customized results. To address this limitation, we investigate the MM-Attention mechanism within the DiT model and observe that the Query and Key tokens share a bias vector that is only layer-dependent. We interpret this bias as representing the model's inherent editing behavior, while the delta between each token and its corresponding bias encodes the content-specific editing signals. Based on this insight, we propose Group Relative Attention Guidance, a simple yet effective method that reweights the delta values of different tokens to modulate the focus of the model on the input image relative to the editing instruction, enabling continuous and fine-grained control over editing intensity without any tuning. Extensive experiments conducted on existing image editing frameworks demonstrate that GRAG can be integrated with as few as four lines of code, consistently enhancing editing quality. Moreover, compared to the commonly used Classifier-Free Guidance, GRAG achieves smoother and more precise control over the degree of editing. Our code will be released at https://github.com/little-misfit/GRAG-Image-Editing.

To answer one-to-many factual queries (e.g., listing cities of a country), a language model (LM) must simultaneously recall knowledge and avoid repeating previous answers. How are these two subtasks implemented and integrated internally? Across multiple datasets and models, we identify a promote-then-suppress mechanism: the model first recalls all answers, and then suppresses previously generated ones. Specifically, LMs use both the subject and previous answer tokens to perform knowledge recall, with attention propagating subject information and MLPs promoting the answers. Then, attention attends to and suppresses previous answer tokens, while MLPs amplify the suppression signal. Our mechanism is corroborated by extensive experimental evidence: in addition to using early decoding and causal tracing, we analyze how components use different tokens by introducing both Token Lens, which decodes aggregated attention updates from specified tokens, and a knockout method that analyzes changes in MLP outputs after removing attention to specified tokens. Overall, we provide new insights into how LMs' internal components interact with different input tokens to support complex factual recall. Code is available at https://github.com/Lorenayannnnn/how-lms-answer-one-to-many-factual-queries.

As fine-tuning (FT) becomes increasingly impractical at scale, probing is emerging as the preferred evaluation protocol for self-supervised learning (SSL). Yet, the standard linear probing (LP) fails to adequately reflect the potential of models trained with Masked Image Modeling (MIM), due to the distributed nature of patch tokens. This motivates the need for attentive probing, an alternative that uses attention to selectively aggregate patch-level features. Despite its growing adoption, attentive probing remains under-explored, with existing methods suffering from excessive parameterization and poor computational efficiency. In this work, we revisit attentive probing through the lens of the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. We conduct a systematic study of existing methods, analyzing their mechanisms and benchmarking their performance. We introduce efficient probing (EP), a multi-query cross-attention mechanism that eliminates redundant projections, reduces the number of trainable parameters, and achieves up to a 10times speed-up over conventional multi-head attention. Despite its simplicity, EP outperforms LP and prior attentive probing approaches across seven benchmarks, generalizes well beyond MIM to diverse pre-training paradigms, produces interpretable attention maps, and achieves strong gains in low-shot and layer-wise settings. Code available at https://github.com/billpsomas/efficient-probing.

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to the implementation of self-attention mechanisms. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the length of inference tokens increases. This paper addresses these issues by decomposing the Softmax operation into a non-linear transformation and the l_1-norm. We identify the latter as essential for maintaining model performance. By replacing the non-linear transformation with the Softplus activation function and introducing a dynamic scale factor for different token lengths based on invariance entropy, we create a novel attention mechanism with performance better than conventional Softmax attention across various inference lengths. To further improve the length extrapolation ability of the proposed attention mechanism, we introduce a fine-tuning-free re-weighting mechanism that amplifies significant attention weights while diminishing weaker ones, enabling the model to concentrate more effectively on relevant tokens without requiring retraining. When combined with our proposed attention mechanism, this approach demonstrates significant promise in managing longer sequences, maintaining nearly constant validation loss even at 16times the training token length while ensuring numerical stability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/iminfine/freeatten.

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching billions of parameters. These huge models are memory hungry and incur significant inference latency even on cutting edge AI-accelerators, such as GPUs. Specifically, the time and memory complexity of the attention operation is quadratic in terms of the total context length, i.e., prompt and output tokens. Thus, several optimizations such as key-value tensor caching and FlashAttention computation have been proposed to deliver the low latency demands of applications relying on such large models. However, these techniques do not cater to the computationally distinct nature of different phases during inference. To that end, we propose LeanAttention, a scalable technique of computing self-attention for the token-generation phase (decode-phase) of decoder-only transformer models. LeanAttention enables scaling the attention mechanism implementation for the challenging case of long context lengths by re-designing the execution flow for the decode-phase. We identify that the associative property of online softmax can be treated as a reduction operation thus allowing us to parallelize the attention computation over these large context lengths. We extend the "stream-K" style reduction of tiled calculation to self-attention to enable parallel computation resulting in an average of 2.6x attention execution speedup over FlashAttention-2 and up to 8.33x speedup for 512k context lengths.

This study explores the role of cross-attention during inference in text-conditional diffusion models. We find that cross-attention outputs converge to a fixed point after few inference steps. Accordingly, the time point of convergence naturally divides the entire inference process into two stages: an initial semantics-planning stage, during which, the model relies on cross-attention to plan text-oriented visual semantics, and a subsequent fidelity-improving stage, during which the model tries to generate images from previously planned semantics. Surprisingly, ignoring text conditions in the fidelity-improving stage not only reduces computation complexity, but also maintains model performance. This yields a simple and training-free method called TGATE for efficient generation, which caches the cross-attention output once it converges and keeps it fixed during the remaining inference steps. Our empirical study on the MS-COCO validation set confirms its effectiveness. The source code of TGATE is available at https://github.com/HaozheLiu-ST/T-GATE.

Large Language Models have shown remarkable efficacy in generating streaming data such as text and audio, thanks to their temporally uni-directional attention mechanism, which models correlations between the current token and previous tokens. However, video streaming remains much less explored, despite a growing need for live video processing. State-of-the-art video diffusion models leverage bi-directional temporal attention to model the correlations between the current frame and all the surrounding (i.e. including future) frames, which hinders them from processing streaming videos. To address this problem, we present Live2Diff, the first attempt at designing a video diffusion model with uni-directional temporal attention, specifically targeting live streaming video translation. Compared to previous works, our approach ensures temporal consistency and smoothness by correlating the current frame with its predecessors and a few initial warmup frames, without any future frames. Additionally, we use a highly efficient denoising scheme featuring a KV-cache mechanism and pipelining, to facilitate streaming video translation at interactive framerates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attention mechanism and pipeline, outperforming previous methods in terms of temporal smoothness and/or efficiency.

In human-written articles, we often leverage the subtleties of text style, such as bold and italics, to guide the attention of readers. These textual emphases are vital for the readers to grasp the conveyed information. When interacting with large language models (LLMs), we have a similar need - steering the model to pay closer attention to user-specified information, e.g., an instruction. Existing methods, however, are constrained to process plain text and do not support such a mechanism. This motivates us to introduce PASTA - Post-hoc Attention STeering Approach, a method that allows LLMs to read text with user-specified emphasis marks. To this end, PASTA identifies a small subset of attention heads and applies precise attention reweighting on them, directing the model attention to user-specified parts. Like prompting, PASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Experiments demonstrate that PASTA can substantially enhance an LLM's ability to follow user instructions or integrate new knowledge from user inputs, leading to a significant performance improvement on a variety of tasks, e.g., an average accuracy improvement of 22% for LLAMA-7B. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QingruZhang/PASTA .

We observe an empirical phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) -- very few activations exhibit significantly larger values than others (e.g., 100,000 times larger). We call them massive activations. First, we demonstrate the widespread existence of massive activations across various LLMs and characterize their locations. Second, we find their values largely stay constant regardless of the input, and they function as indispensable bias terms in LLMs. Third, these massive activations lead to the concentration of attention probabilities to their corresponding tokens, and further, implicit bias terms in the self-attention output. Last, we also study massive activations in Vision Transformers. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/massive-activations.

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models specialize in specific semantic or visual attributes. Building on an established interpretability method, we reinterpret the practice of probing intermediate activations with the final decoding layer through the lens of signal processing. This lets us analyze multiple samples in a principled way and rank attention heads based on their relevance to target concepts. Our results show consistent patterns of specialization at the head level across both unimodal and multimodal transformers. Remarkably, we find that editing as few as 1% of the heads, selected using our method, can reliably suppress or enhance targeted concepts in the model output. We validate our approach on language tasks such as question answering and toxicity mitigation, as well as vision-language tasks including image classification and captioning. Our findings highlight an interpretable and controllable structure within attention layers, offering simple tools for understanding and editing large-scale generative models.

Modern diffusion models, particularly those utilizing a Transformer-based UNet for denoising, rely heavily on self-attention operations to manage complex spatial relationships, thus achieving impressive generation performance. However, this existing paradigm faces significant challenges in generating high-resolution visual content due to its quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to the number of spatial tokens. To address this limitation, we aim at a novel linear attention mechanism as an alternative in this paper. Specifically, we begin our exploration from recently introduced models with linear complexity, e.g., Mamba, Mamba2, and Gated Linear Attention, and identify two key features-attention normalization and non-causal inference-that enhance high-resolution visual generation performance. Building on these insights, we introduce a generalized linear attention paradigm, which serves as a low-rank approximation of a wide spectrum of popular linear token mixers. To save the training cost and better leverage pre-trained models, we initialize our models and distill the knowledge from pre-trained StableDiffusion (SD). We find that the distilled model, termed LinFusion, achieves performance on par with or superior to the original SD after only modest training, while significantly reducing time and memory complexity. Extensive experiments on SD-v1.5, SD-v2.1, and SD-XL demonstrate that LinFusion delivers satisfactory zero-shot cross-resolution generation performance, generating high-resolution images like 16K resolution. Moreover, it is highly compatible with pre-trained SD components, such as ControlNet and IP-Adapter, requiring no adaptation efforts. Codes are available at https://github.com/Huage001/LinFusion.

We rethink test-time scaling laws from a practical efficiency perspective, revealing that the effectiveness of smaller models is significantly overestimated. Prior work, grounded in compute-optimality, overlooks critical memory access bottlenecks introduced by inference-time strategies (e.g., Best-of-N, long CoTs). Our holistic analysis, spanning models from 0.6B to 32B parameters, reveals a new Kinetics Scaling Law that better guides resource allocation by incorporating both computation and memory access costs. Kinetics Scaling Law suggests that test-time compute is more effective when used on models above a threshold than smaller ones. A key reason is that in TTS, attention, rather than parameter count, emerges as the dominant cost factor. Motivated by this, we propose a new scaling paradigm centered on sparse attention, which lowers per-token cost and enables longer generations and more parallel samples within the same resource budget. Empirically, we show that sparse attention models consistently outperform dense counterparts, achieving over 60 points gains in low-cost regimes and over 5 points gains in high-cost regimes for problem-solving accuracy on AIME, encompassing evaluations on state-of-the-art MoEs. These results suggest that sparse attention is essential for realizing the full potential of test-time scaling because, unlike training, where parameter scaling saturates, test-time accuracy continues to improve through increased generation. The code is available at https://github.com/Infini-AI-Lab/Kinetics.

We propose Hymba, a family of small language models featuring a hybrid-head parallel architecture that integrates transformer attention mechanisms with state space models (SSMs) for enhanced efficiency. Attention heads provide high-resolution recall, while SSM heads enable efficient context summarization. Additionally, we introduce learnable meta tokens that are prepended to prompts, storing critical information and alleviating the "forced-to-attend" burden associated with attention mechanisms. This model is further optimized by incorporating cross-layer key-value (KV) sharing and partial sliding window attention, resulting in a compact cache size. During development, we conducted a controlled study comparing various architectures under identical settings and observed significant advantages of our proposed architecture. Notably, Hymba achieves state-of-the-art results for small LMs: Our Hymba-1.5B-Base model surpasses all sub-2B public models in performance and even outperforms Llama-3.2-3B with 1.32% higher average accuracy, an 11.67x cache size reduction, and 3.49x throughput.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in instruction-following, becoming increasingly crucial across various applications. However, this capability brings with it the risk of prompt injection attacks, where attackers inject instructions into LLMs' input to elicit undesirable actions or content. Understanding the robustness of LLMs against such attacks is vital for their safe implementation. In this work, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the robustness of instruction-following LLMs against prompt injection attacks. Our objective is to determine the extent to which LLMs can be influenced by injected instructions and their ability to differentiate between these injected and original target instructions. Through extensive experiments with leading instruction-following LLMs, we uncover significant vulnerabilities in their robustness to such attacks. Our results indicate that some models are overly tuned to follow any embedded instructions in the prompt, overly focusing on the latter parts of the prompt without fully grasping the entire context. By contrast, models with a better grasp of the context and instruction-following capabilities will potentially be more susceptible to compromise by injected instructions. This underscores the need to shift the focus from merely enhancing LLMs' instruction-following capabilities to improving their overall comprehension of prompts and discernment of instructions that are appropriate to follow. We hope our in-depth analysis offers insights into the underlying causes of these vulnerabilities, aiding in the development of future solutions. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Leezekun/instruction-following-robustness-eval

The time complexity of the standard attention mechanism in a transformer scales quadratically with the length of the sequence. We introduce a method to reduce this to linear scaling with time, based on defining attention via latent vectors. The method is readily usable as a drop-in replacement for the standard attention mechanism. Our "Latte Transformer" model can be implemented for both bidirectional and unidirectional tasks, with the causal version allowing a recurrent implementation which is memory and time-efficient during inference of language generation tasks. Whilst next token prediction scales linearly with the sequence length for a standard transformer, a Latte Transformer requires constant time to compute the next token. The empirical performance of our method is comparable to standard attention, yet allows scaling to context windows much larger than practical in standard attention.

Attention is the core mechanism of today's most used architectures for natural language processing and has been analyzed from many perspectives, including its effectiveness for machine translation-related tasks. Among these studies, attention resulted to be a useful source of information to get insights about word alignment also when the input text is substituted with audio segments, as in the case of the speech translation (ST) task. In this paper, we propose AlignAtt, a novel policy for simultaneous ST (SimulST) that exploits the attention information to generate source-target alignments that guide the model during inference. Through experiments on the 8 language pairs of MuST-C v1.0, we show that AlignAtt outperforms previous state-of-the-art SimulST policies applied to offline-trained models with gains in terms of BLEU of 2 points and latency reductions ranging from 0.5s to 0.8s across the 8 languages.

Hallucination has emerged as the most vulnerable aspect of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce the Sorry, Come Again (SCA) prompting, aimed to avoid LLM hallucinations by enhancing comprehension through: (i) optimal paraphrasing and (ii) injecting [PAUSE] tokens to delay LLM generation. First, we provide an in-depth analysis of linguistic nuances: formality, readability, and concreteness of prompts for 21 LLMs, and elucidate how these nuances contribute to hallucinated generation. Prompts with lower readability, formality, or concreteness pose comprehension challenges for LLMs, similar to those faced by humans. In such scenarios, an LLM tends to speculate and generate content based on its imagination (associative memory) to fill these information gaps. Although these speculations may occasionally align with factual information, their accuracy is not assured, often resulting in hallucination. Recent studies reveal that an LLM often neglects the middle sections of extended prompts, a phenomenon termed as lost in the middle. While a specific paraphrase may suit one LLM, the same paraphrased version may elicit a different response from another LLM. Therefore, we propose an optimal paraphrasing technique to identify the most comprehensible paraphrase of a given prompt, evaluated using Integrated Gradient (and its variations) to guarantee that the LLM accurately processes all words. While reading lengthy sentences, humans often pause at various points to better comprehend the meaning read thus far. We have fine-tuned an LLM with injected [PAUSE] tokens, allowing the LLM to pause while reading lengthier prompts. This has brought several key contributions: (i) determining the optimal position to inject [PAUSE], (ii) determining the number of [PAUSE] tokens to be inserted, and (iii) introducing reverse proxy tuning to fine-tune the LLM for [PAUSE] insertion.

Recently, training-free methods for improving large language models (LLMs) have attracted growing interest, with token-level attention tuning emerging as a promising and interpretable direction. However, existing methods typically rely on auxiliary mechanisms to identify important or irrelevant task-specific tokens, introducing potential bias and limiting applicability. In this paper, we uncover a surprising and elegant alternative: the semantically empty initial token is a powerful and underexplored control point for optimizing model behavior. Through theoretical analysis, we show that tuning the initial token's attention sharpens or flattens the attention distribution over subsequent tokens, and its role as an attention sink amplifies this effect. Empirically, we find that: (1) tuning its attention improves LLM performance more effectively than tuning other task-specific tokens; (2) the effect follows a consistent trend across layers, with earlier layers having greater impact, but varies across attention heads, with different heads showing distinct preferences in how they attend to this token. Based on these findings, we propose ZeroTuning, a training-free approach that improves LLM performance by applying head-specific attention adjustments to this special token. Despite tuning only one token, ZeroTuning achieves higher performance on text classification, multiple-choice, and multi-turn conversation tasks across models such as Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek. For example, ZeroTuning improves Llama-3.1-8B by 11.71% on classification, 2.64% on QA tasks, and raises its multi-turn score from 7.804 to 7.966. The method is also robust to limited resources, few-shot settings, long contexts, quantization, decoding strategies, and prompt variations. Our work sheds light on a previously overlooked control point in LLMs, offering new insights into both inference-time tuning and model interpretability.

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their final predictions for text completion tasks. Yet little is known about the specific role of attention heads in producing the final token prediction. We propose Attention Lens, a tool that enables researchers to translate the outputs of attention heads into vocabulary tokens via learned attention-head-specific transformations called lenses. Preliminary findings from our trained lenses indicate that attention heads play highly specialized roles in language models. The code for Attention Lens is available at github.com/msakarvadia/AttentionLens.

Current state-of-the-art machine translation systems are based on encoder-decoder architectures, that first encode the input sequence, and then generate an output sequence based on the input encoding. Both are interfaced with an attention mechanism that recombines a fixed encoding of the source tokens based on the decoder state. We propose an alternative approach which instead relies on a single 2D convolutional neural network across both sequences. Each layer of our network re-codes source tokens on the basis of the output sequence produced so far. Attention-like properties are therefore pervasive throughout the network. Our model yields excellent results, outperforming state-of-the-art encoder-decoder systems, while being conceptually simpler and having fewer parameters.

Recent advancements in sequence prediction have significantly improved the accuracy of video data interpretation; however, existing models often overlook the potential of attention-based mechanisms for next-frame prediction. This study introduces the Vision Augmentation Prediction Autoencoder with Attention Design (VAPAAD), an innovative approach that integrates attention mechanisms into sequence prediction, enabling nuanced analysis and understanding of temporal dynamics in video sequences. Utilizing the Moving MNIST dataset, we demonstrate VAPAAD's robust performance and superior handling of complex temporal data compared to traditional methods. VAPAAD combines data augmentation, ConvLSTM2D layers, and a custom-built self-attention mechanism to effectively focus on salient features within a sequence, enhancing predictive accuracy and context-aware analysis. This methodology not only adheres to human cognitive processes during video interpretation but also addresses limitations in conventional models, which often struggle with the variability inherent in video sequences. The experimental results confirm that VAPAAD outperforms existing models, especially in integrating attention mechanisms, which significantly improve predictive performance.

The leading approaches in language modeling are all obsessed with TV shows of my youth - namely Transformers and Sesame Street. Transformers this, Transformers that, and over here a bonfire worth of GPU-TPU-neuromorphic wafer scale silicon. We opt for the lazy path of old and proven techniques with a fancy crypto inspired acronym: the Single Headed Attention RNN (SHA-RNN). The author's lone goal is to show that the entire field might have evolved a different direction if we had instead been obsessed with a slightly different acronym and slightly different result. We take a previously strong language model based only on boring LSTMs and get it to within a stone's throw of a stone's throw of state-of-the-art byte level language model results on enwik8. This work has undergone no intensive hyperparameter optimization and lived entirely on a commodity desktop machine that made the author's small studio apartment far too warm in the midst of a San Franciscan summer. The final results are achievable in plus or minus 24 hours on a single GPU as the author is impatient. The attention mechanism is also readily extended to large contexts with minimal computation. Take that Sesame Street.

Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short compared to message-passing mechanisms on fixed links, such as those employed by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). This raises a question: ``Does attention fail for graphs in natural language settings?'' Motivated by these observations, we embarked on an empirical study from the perspective of attention mechanisms to explore how LLMs process graph-structured data. The goal is to gain deeper insights into the attention behavior of LLMs over graph structures. We uncovered unique phenomena regarding how LLMs apply attention to graph-structured data and analyzed these findings to improve the modeling of such data by LLMs. The primary findings of our research are: 1) While LLMs can recognize graph data and capture text-node interactions, they struggle to model inter-node relationships within graph structures due to inherent architectural constraints. 2) The attention distribution of LLMs across graph nodes does not align with ideal structural patterns, indicating a failure to adapt to graph topology nuances. 3) Neither fully connected attention nor fixed connectivity is optimal; each has specific limitations in its application scenarios. Instead, intermediate-state attention windows improve LLM training performance and seamlessly transition to fully connected windows during inference. Source code: https://github.com/millioniron/LLM_exploration{LLM4Exploration}

Accurately predicting conversions in advertisements is generally a challenging task, because such conversions do not occur frequently. In this paper, we propose a new framework to support creating high-performing ad creatives, including the accurate prediction of ad creative text conversions before delivering to the consumer. The proposed framework includes three key ideas: multi-task learning, conditional attention, and attention highlighting. Multi-task learning is an idea for improving the prediction accuracy of conversion, which predicts clicks and conversions simultaneously, to solve the difficulty of data imbalance. Furthermore, conditional attention focuses attention of each ad creative with the consideration of its genre and target gender, thus improving conversion prediction accuracy. Attention highlighting visualizes important words and/or phrases based on conditional attention. We evaluated the proposed framework with actual delivery history data (14,000 creatives displayed more than a certain number of times from Gunosy Inc.), and confirmed that these ideas improve the prediction performance of conversions, and visualize noteworthy words according to the creatives' attributes.