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Related papers: The Mean-Field Dynamics of Transformers

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This paper presents CLUSTERFORMER, a universal vision model that is based on the CLUSTERing paradigm with TransFORMER. It comprises two novel designs: 1. recurrent cross-attention clustering, which reformulates the cross-attention mechanism…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-09 James C. Liang , Yiming Cui , Qifan Wang , Tong Geng , Wenguan Wang , Dongfang Liu

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

We show that the core components of the Transformer block -- attention, residual connections, and normalization -- arise naturally from a single geometric estimation problem. Modeling the latent state as a direction on the hypersphere, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Peter Racioppo

Accurate and physically consistent modeling of Earth system dynamics requires machine-learning architectures that operate directly on continuous geophysical fields and preserve their underlying geometric structure. Here we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Maximilian Witte , Johannes Meuer , Étienne Plésiat , Christopher Kadow

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

We consider the self-attention model - an interacting particle system on the unit sphere, which serves as a toy model for Transformers, the deep neural network architecture behind the recent successes of large language models. We prove the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Borjan Geshkovski , Hugo Koubbi , Yury Polyanskiy , Philippe Rigollet

While attention has been empirically shown to improve model performance, it lacks a rigorous mathematical justification. This short paper establishes a novel connection between attention mechanisms and multinomial regression. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr

Self-attention, as the key block of transformers, is a powerful mechanism for extracting features from the inputs. In essence, what self-attention does is to infer the pairwise relations between the elements of the inputs, and modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Lemeng Wu , Xingchao Liu , Qiang Liu

Transformers owe much of their empirical success in natural language processing to the self-attention blocks. Recent perspectives interpret attention blocks as interacting particle systems, whose mean-field limits correspond to gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li , Gabriele Steidl

Transformers have been proven a successful model for a variety of tasks in sequence modeling. However, computing the attention matrix, which is their key component, has quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length, thus making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Apoorv Vyas , Angelos Katharopoulos , François Fleuret

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

We study a random model of deep multi-head self-attention in which the weights are resampled independently across layers and heads, as at initialization of training. Viewing depth as a time variable, the residual stream defines a…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Hugo Koubbi , Borjan Geshkovski , Philippe Rigollet

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

We propose FMMformers, a class of efficient and flexible transformers inspired by the celebrated fast multipole method (FMM) for accelerating interacting particle simulation. FMM decomposes particle-particle interaction into near-field and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-06 Tan M. Nguyen , Vai Suliafu , Stanley J. Osher , Long Chen , Bao Wang

Learning reduced descriptions of chaotic many-body dynamics is fundamentally challenging: although microscopic equations are Markovian, collective observables exhibit strong memory and exponential sensitivity to initial conditions and…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-01-28 Ho Jang , Gia-Wei Chern

Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

The extended dynamical mean field theory has played an important role in the study of quantum phase transitions in heavy fermion systems. In order to incorporate the physics of unconventional superconductivity, we develop a cluster version…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2015-05-19 J. H. Pixley , Ang Cai , Qimiao Si