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arXiv2025

Resting-state fMRI Analysis using Quantum Time-series Transformer

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has emerged as a pivotal tool for revealing intrinsic brain network connectivity and identifying neural biomarkers of neuropsychiatric conditions. However, classical self-attention transformer models--despite their formidable representational power--struggle with quadratic complexity, large parameter counts, and substantial data requirements. To address these barriers, we introduce a Quantum Time-series Transformer, a novel quantum-enhanced transformer architecture leveraging Linear Combination of Unitaries and Quantum Singular Value Transformation. Unlike classical transformers, Quantum Time-series Transformer operates with polylogarithmic computational complexity, markedly reducing training overhead and enabling robust performance even with fewer parameters and limited sample sizes. Empirical evaluation on the largest-scale fMRI datasets from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study and the UK Biobank demonstrates that Quantum Time-series Transformer achieves comparable or superior predictive performance compared to state-of-the-art classical transformer models, with especially pronounced gains in small-sample scenarios. Interpretability analyses using SHapley Additive exPlanations further reveal that Quantum Time-series Transformer reliably identifies clinically meaningful neural biomarkers of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These findings underscore the promise of quantum-enhanced transformers in advancing computational neuroscience by more efficiently modeling complex spatio-temporal dynamics and improving clinical interpretability.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2026

Qubit-centric Transformer for Surface Code Decoding

For reliable large-scale quantum computation, quantum error correction (QEC) is essential to protect logical information distributed across multiple physical qubits. Taking advantage of recent advances in deep learning, neural network-based decoders have emerged as a promising approach to improve the reliability of QEC. We propose the qubit-centric transformer (QCT), a novel and universal QEC decoder based on a transformer architecture with a qubit-centric attention mechanism. Our decoder transforms input syndromes from the stabilizer domain into qubit-centric tokens via a specialized embedding strategy. These qubit-centric tokens are processed through attention layers to effectively identify the underlying logical error. Furthermore, we introduce a graph-based masking method that incorporates the topological structure of quantum codes, enforcing attention toward relevant qubit interactions. Across various code distances for surface codes, QCT achieves state-of-the-art decoding performance, significantly outperforming existing neural decoders and the belief propagation (BP) with ordered statistics decoding (OSD) baseline. Notably, QCT achieves a high threshold of 18.1% under depolarizing noise, which closely approaches the theoretical bound of 18.9% and surpasses both the BP+OSD and the minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) thresholds. This qubit-centric approach provides a scalable and robust framework for surface code decoding, advancing the path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

State-Space Models for Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Networks

Recent advancements in foundation models for tabular data, such as TabPFN, demonstrated that pretrained Transformer architectures can approximate Bayesian inference with high predictive performance. However, Transformers suffer from quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length, motivating the exploration of more efficient sequence models. In this work, we investigate the potential of using Hydra, a bidirectional linear-time structured state space model (SSM), as an alternative to Transformers in TabPFN. A key challenge lies in SSM's inherent sensitivity to the order of input tokens - an undesirable property for tabular datasets where the row order is semantically meaningless. We investigate to what extent a bidirectional approach can preserve efficiency and enable symmetric context aggregation. Our experiments show that this approach reduces the order-dependence, achieving predictive performance competitive to the original TabPFN model.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

JetFormer: A Scalable and Efficient Transformer for Jet Tagging from Offline Analysis to FPGA Triggers

We present JetFormer, a versatile and scalable encoder-only Transformer architecture for particle jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Unlike prior approaches that are often tailored to specific deployment regimes, JetFormer is designed to operate effectively across the full spectrum of jet tagging scenarios, from high-accuracy offline analysis to ultra-low-latency online triggering. The model processes variable-length sets of particle features without relying on input of explicit pairwise interactions, yet achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. On the large-scale JetClass dataset, a large-scale JetFormer matches the accuracy of the interaction-rich ParT model (within 0.7%) while using 37.4% fewer FLOPs, demonstrating its computational efficiency and strong generalization. On benchmark HLS4ML 150P datasets, JetFormer consistently outperforms existing models such as MLPs, Deep Sets, and Interaction Networks by 3-4% in accuracy. To bridge the gap to hardware deployment, we further introduce a hardware-aware optimization pipeline based on multi-objective hyperparameter search, yielding compact variants like JetFormer-tiny suitable for FPGA-based trigger systems with sub-microsecond latency requirements. Through structured pruning and quantization, we show that JetFormer can be aggressively compressed with minimal accuracy loss. By unifying high-performance modeling and deployability within a single architectural framework, JetFormer provides a practical pathway for deploying Transformer-based jet taggers in both offline and online environments at the LHC. Code is available at https://github.com/walkieq/JetFormer.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

On Comparison of Encoders for Attention based End to End Speech Recognition in Standalone and Rescoring Mode

The streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are more popular and suitable for voice-based applications. However, non-streaming models provide better performance as they look at the entire audio context. To leverage the benefits of the non-streaming model in streaming applications like voice search, it is commonly used in second pass re-scoring mode. The candidate hypothesis generated using steaming models is re-scored using a non-streaming model. In this work, we evaluate the non-streaming attention-based end-to-end ASR models on the Flipkart voice search task in both standalone and re-scoring modes. These models are based on Listen-Attend-Spell (LAS) encoder-decoder architecture. We experiment with different encoder variations based on LSTM, Transformer, and Conformer. We compare the latency requirements of these models along with their performance. Overall we show that the Transformer model offers acceptable WER with the lowest latency requirements. We report a relative WER improvement of around 16% with the second pass LAS re-scoring with latency overhead under 5ms. We also highlight the importance of CNN front-end with Transformer architecture to achieve comparable word error rates (WER). Moreover, we observe that in the second pass re-scoring mode all the encoders provide similar benefits whereas the difference in performance is prominent in standalone text generation mode.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

On the Influence of Shape, Texture and Color for Learning Semantic Segmentation

Recent research has investigated the shape and texture biases of pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) in image classification. Those works test how much a trained DNN relies on specific image cues like texture. The present study shifts the focus to understanding the cue influence during training, analyzing what DNNs can learn from shape, texture, and color cues in absence of the others; investigating their individual and combined influence on the learning success. We analyze these cue influences at multiple levels by decomposing datasets into cue-specific versions. Addressing semantic segmentation, we learn the given task from these reduced cue datasets, creating cue experts. Early fusion of cues is performed by constructing appropriate datasets. This is complemented by a late fusion of experts which allows us to study cue influence location-dependent on pixel level. Experiments on Cityscapes, PASCAL Context, and a synthetic CARLA dataset show that while no single cue dominates, the shape + color expert predominantly improves the prediction of small objects and border pixels. The cue performance order is consistent for the tested convolutional and transformer architecture, indicating similar cue extraction capabilities, although pre-trained transformers are said to be more biased towards shape than convolutional neural networks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Resonant Sparse Geometry Networks

We introduce Resonant Sparse Geometry Networks (RSGN), a brain-inspired architecture with self-organizing sparse hierarchical input-dependent connectivity. Unlike Transformer architectures that employ dense attention mechanisms with O(n^2) computational complexity, RSGN embeds computational nodes in learned hyperbolic space where connection strength decays with geodesic distance, achieving dynamic sparsity that adapts to each input. The architecture operates on two distinct timescales: fast differentiable activation propagation optimized through gradient descent, and slow Hebbian-inspired structural learning for connectivity adaptation through local correlation rules. We provide rigorous mathematical analysis demonstrating that RSGN achieves O(n*k) computational complexity, where k << n represents the average active neighborhood size. Experimental evaluation on hierarchical classification and long-range dependency tasks demonstrates that RSGN achieves 96.5% accuracy on long-range dependency tasks while using approximately 15x fewer parameters than standard Transformers. On challenging hierarchical classification with 20 classes, RSGN achieves 23.8% accuracy (compared to 5% random baseline) with only 41,672 parameters, nearly 10x fewer than the Transformer baselines which require 403,348 parameters to achieve 30.1% accuracy. Our ablation studies confirm the contribution of each architectural component, with Hebbian learning providing consistent improvements. These results suggest that brain-inspired principles of sparse, geometrically-organized computation offer a promising direction toward more efficient and biologically plausible neural architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Video Swin Transformer

The vision community is witnessing a modeling shift from CNNs to Transformers, where pure Transformer architectures have attained top accuracy on the major video recognition benchmarks. These video models are all built on Transformer layers that globally connect patches across the spatial and temporal dimensions. In this paper, we instead advocate an inductive bias of locality in video Transformers, which leads to a better speed-accuracy trade-off compared to previous approaches which compute self-attention globally even with spatial-temporal factorization. The locality of the proposed video architecture is realized by adapting the Swin Transformer designed for the image domain, while continuing to leverage the power of pre-trained image models. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on a broad range of video recognition benchmarks, including on action recognition (84.9 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400 and 86.1 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-600 with ~20x less pre-training data and ~3x smaller model size) and temporal modeling (69.6 top-1 accuracy on Something-Something v2). The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SwinTransformer/Video-Swin-Transformer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Llama-Mimi: Exploring the Limits of Flattened Speech Language Modeling

Speech Language Models (SpeechLMs) model tokenized speech to capture both semantic and acoustic information. When neural audio codecs based on Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) are used as audio tokenizers, they produce multiple discrete tokens per time step, yielding inherently multi-level representations. To process these multi-level tokens together, prior work typically adopts hierarchical architectures to capture this structure. In contrast, recent progress in NLP has progressively reduced architectural inductive biases, moving toward simpler and more scalable single-Transformer architectures. In this work, we propose Llama-Mimi, which flattens multi-level RVQ tokens produced by the Mimi neural audio codec into a single sequence and models them autoregressively with a Transformer decoder. We show that Llama-Mimi outperforms a CSM-based hierarchical model on most tasks and achieves the best performance on acoustic consistency. Our models, code, and speech samples are publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Benchmarking On-Device Machine Learning on Apple Silicon with MLX

The recent widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning in general has sparked research interest in exploring the possibilities of deploying these models on smaller devices such as laptops and mobile phones. This creates a need for frameworks and approaches that are capable of taking advantage of on-device hardware. The MLX framework was created to address this need. It is a framework optimized for machine learning (ML) computations on Apple silicon devices, facilitating easier research, experimentation, and prototyping. This paper presents a performance evaluation of MLX, focusing on inference latency of transformer models. We compare the performance of different transformer architecture implementations in MLX with their Pytorch counterparts. For this research we create a framework called MLX-transformers which includes different transformer implementations in MLX and downloads the model checkpoints in pytorch and converts it to the MLX format. By leveraging the advanced architecture and capabilities of Apple Silicon, MLX-Transformers enables seamless execution of transformer models directly sourced from Hugging Face, eliminating the need for checkpoint conversion often required when porting models between frameworks. Our study benchmarks different transformer models on two Apple Silicon macbook devices against an NVIDIA CUDA GPU. Specifically, we compare the inference latency performance of models with the same parameter sizes and checkpoints. We evaluate the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa models, with the intention of extending future work to include models of different modalities, thus providing a more comprehensive assessment of MLX's capabilities. The results highlight MLX's potential in enabling efficient and more accessible on-device ML applications within Apple's ecosystem.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Speed Always Wins: A Survey on Efficient Architectures for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have delivered impressive results in language understanding, generation, reasoning, and pushes the ability boundary of multimodal models. Transformer models, as the foundation of modern LLMs, offer a strong baseline with excellent scaling properties. However, the traditional transformer architecture requires substantial computations and poses significant obstacles for large-scale training and practical deployment. In this survey, we offer a systematic examination of innovative LLM architectures that address the inherent limitations of transformers and boost the efficiency. Starting from language modeling, this survey covers the background and technical details of linear and sparse sequence modeling methods, efficient full attention variants, sparse mixture-of-experts, hybrid model architectures incorporating the above techniques, and emerging diffusion LLMs. Additionally, we discuss applications of these techniques to other modalities and consider their wider implications for developing scalable, resource-aware foundation models. By grouping recent studies into the above category, this survey presents a blueprint of modern efficient LLM architectures, and we hope this could help motivate future research toward more efficient, versatile AI systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

On the Power of Convolution Augmented Transformer

The transformer architecture has catalyzed revolutionary advances in language modeling. However, recent architectural recipes, such as state-space models, have bridged the performance gap. Motivated by this, we examine the benefits of Convolution-Augmented Transformer (CAT) for recall, copying, and length generalization tasks. CAT incorporates convolutional filters in the K/Q/V embeddings of an attention layer. Through CAT, we show that the locality of the convolution synergizes with the global view of the attention. Unlike comparable architectures, such as Mamba or transformer, CAT can provably solve the associative recall (AR) and copying tasks using a single layer while also enjoying guaranteed length generalization. We also establish computational tradeoffs between convolution and attention by characterizing how convolution can mitigate the need for full attention by summarizing the context window and creating salient summary tokens to attend. Evaluations on real datasets corroborate our findings and demonstrate that CAT and its variations indeed enhance the language modeling performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Echo State Transformer: Attention Over Finite Memories

While Large Language Models and their underlying Transformer architecture are remarkably efficient, they do not reflect how our brain processes and learns a diversity of cognitive tasks such as language, nor how it leverages working memory. Furthermore, Transformers encounters a computational limitation: quadratic complexity growth with sequence length. Motivated by these limitations, we aim to design architectures that leverage efficient working memory dynamics to overcome standard computational barriers. We introduce Echo State Transformers (EST), a hybrid architecture that resolves this challenge while demonstrating state of the art performance in classification and detection tasks. EST integrates the Transformer attention mechanisms with nodes from Reservoir Computing to create a fixed-size memory system. Drawing inspiration from Echo State Networks, our approach leverages several reservoirs (random recurrent networks) in parallel as a lightweight and efficient working memory. These independent units possess distinct and learned internal dynamics with an adaptive leak rate, enabling them to dynamically adjust their own temporality. By applying attention on those fixed number of units instead of input tokens, EST achieves linear complexity for the whole sequence, effectively breaking the quadratic scaling problem of standard Transformers. We evaluate ESTs on a recent timeseries benchmark: the Time Series Library, which comprises 69 tasks across five categories. Results show that ESTs ranks first overall in two of five categories, outperforming strong state-of-the-art baselines on classification and anomaly detection tasks, while remaining competitive on short-term forecasting. These results demonstrate that by shifting the attention mechanism from the entire input sequence to a fixed set of evolving memory units, it is possible to maintains high sensitivity to temporal events while achieving constant computational complexity per step.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

InCrowdFormer: On-Ground Pedestrian World Model From Egocentric Views

We introduce an on-ground Pedestrian World Model, a computational model that can predict how pedestrians move around an observer in the crowd on the ground plane, but from just the egocentric-views of the observer. Our model, InCrowdFormer, fully leverages the Transformer architecture by modeling pedestrian interaction and egocentric to top-down view transformation with attention, and autoregressively predicts on-ground positions of a variable number of people with an encoder-decoder architecture. We encode the uncertainties arising from unknown pedestrian heights with latent codes to predict the posterior distributions of pedestrian positions. We validate the effectiveness of InCrowdFormer on a novel prediction benchmark of real movements. The results show that InCrowdFormer accurately predicts the future coordination of pedestrians. To the best of our knowledge, InCrowdFormer is the first-of-its-kind pedestrian world model which we believe will benefit a wide range of egocentric-view applications including crowd navigation, tracking, and synthesis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Adaptive Multi Scale Document Binarisation Using Vision Mamba

Enhancing and preserving the readability of document images, particularly historical ones, is crucial for effective document image analysis. Numerous models have been proposed for this task, including convolutional-based, transformer-based, and hybrid convolutional-transformer architectures. While hybrid models address the limitations of purely convolutional or transformer-based methods, they often suffer from issues like quadratic time complexity. In this work, we propose a Mamba-based architecture for document binarisation, which efficiently handles long sequences by scaling linearly and optimizing memory usage. Additionally, we introduce novel modifications to the skip connections by incorporating Difference of Gaussians (DoG) features, inspired by conventional signal processing techniques. These multiscale high-frequency features enable the model to produce high-quality, detailed outputs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Survey and Evaluation of Converging Architecture in LLMs based on Footsteps of Operations

The advent of the Attention mechanism and Transformer architecture enables contextually natural text generation and compresses the burden of processing entire source information into singular vectors. Based on these two main ideas, model sizes gradually increases to accommodate more precise and comprehensive information, leading to the current state-of-the-art LLMs being very large, with parameters around 70 billion. As the model sizes are growing, the demand for substantial storage and computational capacity increases. This leads to the development of high-bandwidth memory and accelerators, as well as a variety of model architectures designed to meet these requirements. We note that LLM architectures have increasingly converged. This paper analyzes how these converged architectures perform in terms of layer configurations, operational mechanisms, and model sizes, considering various hyperparameter settings. In this paper, we conduct a concise survey of the history of LLMs by tracing the evolution of their operational improvements. Furthermore, we summarize the performance trends of LLMs under various hyperparameter settings using the RTX 6000, which features the state-of-the-art Ada Lovelace architecture. We conclude that even the same model can exhibit different behaviors depending on the hyperparameters or whether it is deployed in server or edge environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Cross-Attention Message-Passing Transformers for Code-Agnostic Decoding in 6G Networks

Channel coding for 6G networks is expected to support a wide range of requirements arising from heterogeneous communication scenarios. These demands challenge traditional code-specific decoders, which lack the flexibility and scalability required for next-generation systems. To tackle this problem, we propose an AI-native foundation model for unified and code-agnostic decoding based on the transformer architecture. We first introduce a cross-attention message-passing transformer (CrossMPT). CrossMPT employs two masked cross-attention blocks that iteratively update two distinct input representations-magnitude and syndrome vectors-allowing the model to effectively learn the decoding problem. Notably, our CrossMPT has achieved state-of-the-art decoding performance among single neural decoders. Building on this, we develop foundation CrossMPT (FCrossMPT) by making the architecture invariant to code length, rate, and class, allowing a single trained model to decode a broad range of codes without retraining. To further enhance decoding performance, particularly for short blocklength codes, we propose CrossMPT ensemble decoder (CrossED), an ensemble decoder composed of multiple parallel CrossMPT blocks employing different parity-check matrices. This architecture can also serve as a foundation model, showing strong generalization across diverse code types. Overall, the proposed AI-native code-agnostic decoder offers flexibility, scalability, and high performance, presenting a promising direction to channel coding for 6G networks.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models

Most widely-used pre-trained language models operate on sequences of tokens corresponding to word or subword units. By comparison, token-free models that operate directly on raw text (bytes or characters) have many benefits: they can process text in any language out of the box, they are more robust to noise, and they minimize technical debt by removing complex and error-prone text preprocessing pipelines. Since byte or character sequences are longer than token sequences, past work on token-free models has often introduced new model architectures designed to amortize the cost of operating directly on raw text. In this paper, we show that a standard Transformer architecture can be used with minimal modifications to process byte sequences. We characterize the trade-offs in terms of parameter count, training FLOPs, and inference speed, and show that byte-level models are competitive with their token-level counterparts. We also demonstrate that byte-level models are significantly more robust to noise and perform better on tasks that are sensitive to spelling and pronunciation. As part of our contribution, we release a new set of pre-trained byte-level Transformer models based on the T5 architecture, as well as all code and data used in our experiments.

cs.CL↗