| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model locality for self-attention networks have shown great value for capturing global dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to model localness for self-attention networks to capture local context . they cast localness modeling as a learnable Gaussian bias, which indicates the central and scope of the local region to be paid more attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the ability to capture local context and improves accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate local and global information into self-attention networks have been criticized for overlooking neighboring information. |
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Mitigating Attention Localization in Small Scale: Self-Attention Refinement via One-step Belief Propagation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for self-attention models is proposed to address this problem . it injects *multi-hop* relationships into the attention graph, allowing for better performance . |
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Rethinking Self-Attention: Towards Interpretability in Neural Parsing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that attention mechanisms provide arguably explainable attention distributions that can help to interpret predictions. |
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Improving Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation via Modeling Localness (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models suffer from poor localization quality due to sequential dependencies within the target sentence. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models of self-attention networks lack the ability to capture dependencies regardless of distance and can be enhanced with multi-head attention. |
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Why Self-Attention? A Targeted Evaluation of Neural Machine Translation Architectures (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that non-recurrent architectures outperform RNNs in neural machine translation. |
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Phrase-level Self-Attention Networks for Universal Sentence Encoding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Phrase-level self-attention networks (PSAN) can capture context dependencies at the phrase level instead of the sentence level. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform self-attention across words inside a phrase to capture context dependencies at the phrase level and use the gated memory updating mechanism to refine each word’s representation hierarchically with longer-term context dependency captured in a larger phrase. |
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On the Locality of Attention in Direct Speech Translation (2022.acl-srw)
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Exploring Attention Attractors in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that attention attractors function as "summary tokens" while others speculate that tokens with weaker semantics attract high attention, they act as attention sinks that offload excessive attention. |
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Context-Aware Cross-Attention for Non-Autoregressive Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that non-autoregressive translation models can predict all tokens independently and simultaneously. |
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