# Disentangling and Integrating Relational and Sensory Information in Transformer Architectures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16727/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 small](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00593/) (2022)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [In-context Learning and Induction Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11895/) (2022)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Language as a Wave Phenomenon: Semantic Phase Locking and Interference in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01208/) (2025)
- [SceneNAT: Masked Generative Modeling for Language-Guided Indoor Scene Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07218/) (2026)
- [Why Relational Graphs Will Save the Next Generation of Vision Foundation Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18421/) (2025)
- [Shortcut Solutions Learned by Transformers Impair Continual Compositional Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05495/) (2026)
- [Relational Attention for Data-Efficient Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20530/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent systems, enabling robust and data-efficient inductive generalization. Recent empirical evidence shows that many existing neural architectures, including Transformers, struggle with tasks requiring relational reasoning. In this work, we distinguish between two types of information: sensory information about the properties of individual objects, and relational information about the relationships between objects. While neural attention provides a powerful mechanism for controlling the flow of sensory information between objects, the Transformer lacks an explicit computational mechanism for routing and processing relational information. To address this limitation, we propose an architectural extension of the Transformer framework that we call the Dual Attention Transformer (DAT), featuring two distinct attention mechanisms: sensory attention for directing the flow of sensory information, and a novel relational attention mechanism for directing the flow of relational information. We empirically evaluate DAT on a diverse set of tasks ranging from synthetic relational benchmarks to complex real-world tasks such as language modeling and visual processing. Our results demonstrate that integrating explicit relational computational mechanisms into the Transformer architecture leads to significant performance gains in terms of data efficiency and parameter efficiency.