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At least 343 records · Page 19Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

FED-HARGPT: A Hybrid Centralized-Federated Approach of a Transformer-based Architecture for Human Context Recognition

The study explores a hybrid centralized-federated approach for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using a Transformer-based architecture. With the increasing ubiquity of edge devices, such as smartphones and wearables, a significant amount of private data from wearable and inertial sensors is generated, facilitating discreet monitoring of human activities, including resting, sleeping, and walking. This research focuses on deploying HAR technologies using mobile sensor data and leveraging Federated Learning within the Flower framework to evaluate the training of a federated model derived from a centralized baseline. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid approach in improving the accuracy and robustness of HAR models while preserving data privacy in a non-IID data scenario. The federated learning setup demonstrated comparable performance to centralized models, highlighting the potential of federated learning to strike a balance between data privacy and model performance in real-world applications.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Synthesizing Proteins on the Graphics Card. Protein Folding and the Limits of Critical AI Studies

This paper investigates the application of the transformer architecture in protein folding, as exemplified by DeepMind's AlphaFold project, and its implications for the understanding of so-called large language models. The prevailing discourse often assumes a ready-made analogy between proteins, encoded as sequences of amino acids, and natural language, which we term the language paradigm of computational (structural) biology. Instead of assuming this analogy as given, we critically evaluate it to assess the kind of knowledge-making afforded by the transformer architecture. We first trace the analogy's emergence and historical development, carving out the influence of structural linguistics on structural biology beginning in the mid-20th century. We then examine three often overlooked preprocessing steps essential to the transformer architecture, including subword tokenization, word embedding, and positional encoding, to demonstrate its regime of representation based on continuous, high-dimensional vector spaces, which departs from the discrete nature of language. The successful deployment of transformers in protein folding, we argue, discloses what we consider a non-linguistic approach to token processing intrinsic to the architecture. We contend that through this non-linguistic processing, the transformer architecture carves out unique epistemological territory and produces a new class of knowledge, distinct from established domains. We contend that our search for intelligent machines has to begin with the shape, rather than the place, of intelligence. Consequently, the emerging field of critical AI studies should take methodological inspiration from the history of science in its quest to conceptualize the contributions of artificial intelligence to knowledge-making, within and beyond the domain-specific sciences.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Looped Transformers are Better at Learning Learning Algorithms

Transformers have demonstrated effectiveness in in-context solving data-fitting problems from various (latent) models, as reported by Garg et al. However, the absence of an inherent iterative structure in the transformer architecture presents a challenge in emulating the iterative algorithms, which are commonly employed in traditional machine learning methods. To address this, we propose the utilization of looped transformer architecture and its associated training methodology, with the aim of incorporating iterative characteristics into the transformer architectures. Experimental results suggest that the looped transformer achieves performance comparable to the standard transformer in solving various data-fitting problems, while utilizing less than 10% of the parameter count.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Towards Light Weight Object Detection System

Transformers are a popular choice for classification tasks and as backbones for object detection tasks. However, their high latency brings challenges in their adaptation to lightweight object detection systems. We present an approximation of the self-attention layers used in the transformer architecture. This approximation reduces the latency of the classification system while incurring minimal loss in accuracy. We also present a method that uses a transformer encoder layer for multi-resolution feature fusion. This feature fusion improves the accuracy of the state-of-the-art lightweight object detection system without significantly increasing the number of parameters. Finally, we provide an abstraction for the transformer architecture called Generalized Transformer (gFormer) that can guide the design of novel transformer-like architectures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

PE-former: Pose Estimation Transformer

Vision transformer architectures have been demonstrated to work very effectively for image classification tasks. Efforts to solve more challenging vision tasks with transformers rely on convolutional backbones for feature extraction. In this paper we investigate the use of a pure transformer architecture (i.e., one with no CNN backbone) for the problem of 2D body pose estimation. We evaluate two ViT architectures on the COCO dataset. We demonstrate that using an encoder-decoder transformer architecture yields state of the art results on this estimation problem.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

MS-SCANet: A Multiscale Transformer-Based Architecture with Dual Attention for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

We present the Multi-Scale Spatial Channel Attention Network (MS-SCANet), a transformer-based architecture designed for no-reference image quality assessment (IQA). MS-SCANet features a dual-branch structure that processes images at multiple scales, effectively capturing both fine and coarse details, an improvement over traditional single-scale methods. By integrating tailored spatial and channel attention mechanisms, our model emphasizes essential features while minimizing computational complexity. A key component of MS-SCANet is its cross-branch attention mechanism, which enhances the integration of features across different scales, addressing limitations in previous approaches. We also introduce two new consistency loss functions, Cross-Branch Consistency Loss and Adaptive Pooling Consistency Loss, which maintain spatial integrity during feature scaling, outperforming conventional linear and bilinear techniques. Extensive evaluations on datasets like KonIQ-10k, LIVE, LIVE Challenge, and CSIQ show that MS-SCANet consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust framework with stronger correlations with subjective human scores.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Vision-RWKV: Efficient and Scalable Visual Perception with RWKV-Like Architectures

Transformers have revolutionized computer vision and natural language processing, but their high computational complexity limits their application in high-resolution image processing and long-context analysis. This paper introduces Vision-RWKV (VRWKV), a model adapted from the RWKV model used in the NLP field with necessary modifications for vision tasks. Similar to the Vision Transformer (ViT), our model is designed to efficiently handle sparse inputs and demonstrate robust global processing capabilities, while also scaling up effectively, accommodating both large-scale parameters and extensive datasets. Its distinctive advantage lies in its reduced spatial aggregation complexity, which renders it exceptionally adept at processing high-resolution images seamlessly, eliminating the necessity for windowing operations. Our evaluations demonstrate that VRWKV surpasses ViT's performance in image classification and has significantly faster speeds and lower memory usage processing high-resolution inputs. In dense prediction tasks, it outperforms window-based models, maintaining comparable speeds. These results highlight VRWKV's potential as a more efficient alternative for visual perception tasks. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Vision-RWKV.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Language Models with Transformers

The Transformer architecture is superior to RNN-based models in computational efficiency. Recently, GPT and BERT demonstrate the efficacy of Transformer models on various NLP tasks using pre-trained language models on large-scale corpora. Surprisingly, these Transformer architectures are suboptimal for language model itself. Neither self-attention nor the positional encoding in the Transformer is able to efficiently incorporate the word-level sequential context crucial to language modeling. In this paper, we explore effective Transformer architectures for language model, including adding additional LSTM layers to better capture the sequential context while still keeping the computation efficient. We propose Coordinate Architecture Search (CAS) to find an effective architecture through iterative refinement of the model. Experimental results on the PTB, WikiText-2, and WikiText-103 show that CAS achieves perplexities between 20.42 and 34.11 on all problems, i.e. on average an improvement of 12.0 perplexity units compared to state-of-the-art LSTMs. The source code is publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

FootBots: A Transformer-based Architecture for Motion Prediction in Soccer

Motion prediction in soccer involves capturing complex dynamics from player and ball interactions. We present FootBots, an encoder-decoder transformer-based architecture addressing motion prediction and conditioned motion prediction through equivariance properties. FootBots captures temporal and social dynamics using set attention blocks and multi-attention block decoder. Our evaluation utilizes two datasets: a real soccer dataset and a tailored synthetic one. Insights from the synthetic dataset highlight the effectiveness of FootBots' social attention mechanism and the significance of conditioned motion prediction. Empirical results on real soccer data demonstrate that FootBots outperforms baselines in motion prediction and excels in conditioned tasks, such as predicting the players based on the ball position, predicting the offensive (defensive) team based on the ball and the defensive (offensive) team, and predicting the ball position based on all players. Our evaluation connects quantitative and qualitative findings. https://youtu.be/9kaEkfzG3L8

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Heterogeneous Chiplet Architecture for Accelerating End-to-End Transformer Models

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning and generative modeling, enabling advancements in natural language processing tasks. However, the size of transformer models is increasing continuously, driven by enhanced capabilities across various deep learning tasks. This trend of ever-increasing model size has given rise to new challenges in terms of memory and compute requirements. Conventional computing platforms, including GPUs, suffer from suboptimal performance due to the memory demands imposed by models with millions/billions of parameters. The emerging chiplet-based platforms provide a new avenue for compute- and data-intensive machine learning (ML) applications enabled by a Network-on-Interposer (NoI). However, designing suitable hardware accelerators for executing Transformer inference workloads is challenging due to a wide variety of complex computing kernels in the Transformer architecture. In this paper, we leverage chiplet-based heterogeneous integration (HI) to design a high-performance and energy-efficient multi-chiplet platform to accelerate transformer workloads. We demonstrate that the proposed NoI architecture caters to the data access patterns inherent in a transformer model. The optimized placement of the chiplets and the associated NoI links and routers enable superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art hardware accelerators. The proposed NoI-based architecture demonstrates scalability across varying transformer models and improves latency and energy efficiency by up to 11.8x and 2.36x, respectively when compared with the existing state-of-the-art architecture HAIMA.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2026

Physics Transformer: Tailoring Transformer for General PDE Prediction

Transformer architectures have attracted increasing attention for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), owing to their flexibility in handling irregular discretizations and their ability to capture long-range physical dependencies. However, unlike discrete language tokens or fixed-resolution image patches, observed physical fields are finite samples of underlying infinite-dimensional functions. Consequently, effectively applying Transformers to PDEs requires a tokenizer that respects the functional nature of physical fields and constructs physically expressive tokens from arbitrary discretizations.To this end, we propose \methodname{Physics Transformer}, a function-projection-based Transformer architecture for physical field prediction. Physics Transformer treats a physical field as a continuous function and partitions its discretization into locality-preserving spatial patches. Within each patch, it dynamically learns a set of adaptive local basis functions and projects the sampled field onto these bases to obtain compact physics tokens. The resulting tokens capture diverse latent physical states while preserving fine-scale spatial structures, enabling efficient global interaction through factorized attention across space and physical states. The projected representation further supports efficient decoding at arbitrary query locations. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks, ranging from two-dimensional PDE dynamics to industrial-scale three-dimensional CFD simulations, demonstrate that Physics Transformer accurately captures fine-grained physical structures and achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance. These results establish function projection as a practical and effective foundation for designing Transformer architectures for PDE solving.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Systematic review of self-supervised foundation models for brain network representation using electroencephalography

Automated analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) has recently undergone a paradigm shift. The introduction of transformer architectures and self-supervised pretraining (SSL) has led to the development of EEG foundation models. These models are pretrained on large amounts of unlabeled data and can be adapted to a range of downstream tasks. This systematic review summarizes recent SSL-trained EEG foundation models that learn whole-brain representations from multichannel EEG rather than representations derived from a single channel. We searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and arXiv through July 21, 2025. Nineteen preprints and peer-reviewed articles met inclusion criteria. We extracted information regarding pretraining datasets, model architectures, pretraining SSL objectives, and downstream task applications. While pretraining data heavily relied on the Temple University EEG corpus, there was significant heterogeneity in model architecture and training objectives across studies. Transformer architectures were identified as the predominant pretraining architecture with state-space models such as MAMBA and S4 as emerging alternatives. Concerning SSL objectives, masked auto-encoding was most common, and other studies incorporate contrastive learning. Downstream tasks varied widely and implemented diverse fine-tuning strategies, which made direct comparison challenging. Furthermore, most studies used single-task fine-tuning, and a generalizable EEG foundation model remains lacking. In conclusion, the field is advancing rapidly but still limited by limited dataset diversity and the absence of standardized benchmarks. Progress will likely depend on larger and more diverse pretraining datasets, standardized evaluation protocols, and multi-task validation. The development will advance EEG foundation models towards robust and general-purpose relevant to both basic and clinical applications.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2014

Multiplierless Approximate 4-point DCT VLSI Architectures for Transform Block Coding

Two multiplierless algorithms are proposed for 4x4 approximate-DCT for transform coding in digital video. Computational architectures for 1-D/2-D realisations are implemented using Xilinx FPGA devices. CMOS synthesis at the 45 nm node indicate real-time operation at 1 GHz yielding 4x4 block rates of 125 MHz at less than 120 mW of dynamic power consumption.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

Memory-Augmented Generative Adversarial Transformers

Conversational AI systems that rely on Large Language Models, like Transformers, have difficulty interweaving external data (like facts) with the language they generate. Vanilla Transformer architectures are not designed for answering factual questions with high accuracy. This paper investigates a possible route for addressing this problem. We propose to extend the standard Transformer architecture with an additional memory bank holding extra information (such as facts drawn from a knowledge base), and an extra attention layer for addressing this memory. We add this augmented memory to a Generative Adversarial Network-inspired Transformer architecture. This setup allows for implementing arbitrary felicity conditions on the generated language of the Transformer. We first demonstrate how this machinery can be deployed for handling factual questions in goal-oriented dialogues. Secondly, we demonstrate that our approach can be useful for applications like {\it style adaptation} as well: the adaptation of utterances according to certain stylistic (external) constraints, like social properties of human interlocutors in dialogues.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Transformer-inspired architectures make machine-learned electron densities accurate and transferable enough to bypass self-consistency

We introduce machine learning models that accurately predict the electron density, the central variable of density functional theory. They are built on Transformer-inspired architectures, which require little computation per parameter and can therefore be enlarged at low cost. The proposed models, SwinUNETR-V2 and its attention-free counterpart NeXtUNETR, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on QM9, with normalized mean absolute errors in the density averaging 0.075% and 0.046%, respectively. The predicted densities are accurate enough to bypass the self-consistent iteration: a single Kohn-Sham step reproduces the self-consistent electronic structure. For NeXtUNETR, the median errors are 0.036 meV in the total energy, 0.65 meV/angstrom in the forces and 1.8 meV in the HOMO-LUMO gap. The forces not only recover the self-consistent minima in geometry optimization but also successfully drive ab initio molecular dynamics. Fine-tuned on small datasets, both networks also transfer accurately to systems containing elements absent from QM9 or larger than its molecules.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2023

Extensive Evaluation of Transformer-based Architectures for Adverse Drug Events Extraction

Adverse Event (ADE) extraction is one of the core tasks in digital pharmacovigilance, especially when applied to informal texts. This task has been addressed by the Natural Language Processing community using large pre-trained language models, such as BERT. Despite the great number of Transformer-based architectures used in the literature, it is unclear which of them has better performances and why. Therefore, in this paper we perform an extensive evaluation and analysis of 19 Transformer-based models for ADE extraction on informal texts. We compare the performance of all the considered models on two datasets with increasing levels of informality (forums posts and tweets). We also combine the purely Transformer-based models with two commonly-used additional processing layers (CRF and LSTM), and analyze their effect on the models performance. Furthermore, we use a well-established feature importance technique (SHAP) to correlate the performance of the models with a set of features that describe them: model category (AutoEncoding, AutoRegressive, Text-to-Text), pretraining domain, training from scratch, and model size in number of parameters. At the end of our analyses, we identify a list of take-home messages that can be derived from the experimental data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

GNN-Transformer Cooperative Architecture for Trustworthy Graph Contrastive Learning

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has become a hot topic in the field of graph representation learning. In contrast to traditional supervised learning relying on a large number of labels, GCL exploits augmentation strategies to generate multiple views and positive/negative pairs, both of which greatly influence the performance. Unfortunately, commonly used random augmentations may disturb the underlying semantics of graphs. Moreover, traditional GNNs, a type of widely employed encoders in GCL, are inevitably confronted with over-smoothing and over-squashing problems. To address these issues, we propose GNN-Transformer Cooperative Architecture for Trustworthy Graph Contrastive Learning (GTCA), which inherits the advantages of both GNN and Transformer, incorporating graph topology to obtain comprehensive graph representations. Theoretical analysis verifies the trustworthiness of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art empirical performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Detecting Spells in Fantasy Literature with a Transformer Based Artificial Intelligence

Transformer architectures and models have made significant progress in language-based tasks. In this area, is BERT one of the most widely used and freely available transformer architecture. In our work, we use BERT for context-based phrase recognition of magic spells in the Harry Potter novel series. Spells are a common part of active magic in fantasy novels. Typically, spells are used in a specific context to achieve a supernatural effect. A series of investigations were conducted to see if a Transformer architecture could recognize such phrases based on their context in the Harry Potter saga. For our studies a pre-trained BERT model was used and fine-tuned utilising different datasets and training methods to identify the searched context. By considering different approaches for sequence classification as well as token classification, it is shown that the context of spells can be recognised. According to our investigations, the examined sequence length for fine-tuning and validation of the model plays a significant role in context recognition. Based on this, we have investigated whether spells have overarching properties that allow a transfer of the neural network models to other fantasy universes as well. The application of our model showed promising results and is worth to be deepened in subsequent studies.

cs.CL↗