English

The Phasor Transformer: Resolving Attention Bottlenecks on the Unit Circle

Machine Learning 2026-03-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Transformer models have redefined sequence learning, yet dot-product self-attention introduces a quadratic token-mixing bottleneck for long-context time-series. We introduce the \textbf{Phasor Transformer} block, a phase-native alternative representing sequence states on the unit-circle manifold S1S^1. Each block combines lightweight trainable phase-shifts with parameter-free Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) token coupling, achieving global O(NlogN)\mathcal{O}(N\log N) mixing without explicit attention maps. Stacking these blocks defines the \textbf{Large Phasor Model (LPM)}. We validate LPM on autoregressive time-series prediction over synthetic multi-frequency benchmarks. Operating with a highly compact parameter budget, LPM learns stable global dynamics and achieves competitive forecasting behavior compared to conventional self-attention baselines. Our results establish an explicit efficiency-performance frontier, demonstrating that large-model scaling for time-series can emerge from geometry-constrained phase computation with deterministic global coupling, offering a practical path toward scalable temporal modeling in oscillatory domains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.17433,
  title  = {The Phasor Transformer: Resolving Attention Bottlenecks on the Unit Circle},
  author = {Dibakar Sigdel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.17433},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:25:40.658Z