Transformer architecture research papers. Locates seminal and current papers detailing transformer variants, theory, and benchmarks. Supports academic work.

Transformer Architecture Research Papers

Curated academic reading list of 19 sources covering foundational architectures, efficient and long-context variants, theoretical analyses, and empirical benchmarks. Duplicate URLs and lower-relevance application papers were excluded.

Seminal architectures

Foundational Transformer papers and surveys that organize the major architectural families, including the original Transformer and vision Transformers.

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Large Transformer-based models are often · pre-trained on large corpora and then fine-tuned for the task at han...
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The genesis of LLM development can be traced back to 2018 with the advent of GPT [2] and BERT [3]. Each model,...

Architectural variants and efficiency

Papers on sparse, efficient, long-context, and alternative sequence architectures, including canonical sparse-attention work and newer surveys or preprints.

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attention with g = 2. (d) the combined BIGBIRD model. Ye et al. [103] proposed binary partitions of the data w...
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mismatch between the two attention mechanisms. Transformer-LS can be applied · to both autoregressive and bidi...
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The promising theoretical computational complexity of these methods contrasts with the fact that today’s most ...
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Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the qua...
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View a PDF of the paper titled Scaling Linear Attention with Sparse State Expansion, by Yuqi ...
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The success of Transformers led to the development of influential models such as BERT (Devlin et al., ...
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The BERT series (Devlin et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019) harnesses only the Encoder with MLM to enhance bidirec...

Theory and mechanisms

Theoretical and mechanistic studies of Transformer expressivity, induction heads, linear attention, and length generalization.

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Abstract page for arXiv paper 2402.00522: Understanding the Expressive Power and Mechanisms o...
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A recent work (Elhage et al., 2021) identified a “rich” in-context mechanism known as induction head, contrast...
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While the result is positive in the sense that training a Transformer model on a finite dataset enables genera...
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While initial efforts focused primarily on transformer expressivity, more recent efforts (Varre et al....
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(2025); Anson et al. (2025); Hashemi et al. (2025) have considered making modifications to th...
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OLMo 2: The best fully open language model to date. Computing Research Repository, arXiv:2501.00656. ... Kaise...

Benchmarks and evaluation

Benchmark papers assessing attention efficiency, long-context modeling, and comparisons among Transformer and alternative sequence architectures.

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We conduct exhaustive experiments to benchmark the performances of nine widely-used efficient attention archit...
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Longvlm: Efficient long video understanding via large language models. In European Conference on Computer Visi...
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Nearly all are built on the transformer architecture, whose attention layers have become a central computation...
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Y. Chen, S. Qian, H. Tang, X. Lai, Z. Liu, S. Han, and J. Jia (2023b) Longlora: efficient fine-tuning of long-...
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This paper addresses these gaps through a rigorous empirical benchmarking study comparing the Mamba architectu...
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