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Related papers: The Mean-Field Dynamics of Transformers

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Transformer architecture has been showing its great strength in visual object tracking, for its effective attention mechanism. Existing transformer-based approaches adopt the pixel-to-pixel attention strategy on flattened image features and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Zikai Song , Junqing Yu , Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen , Wei Yang

Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…

Materials Science · Physics 2025-10-10 Şener Özönder

Transformer models have become the dominant backbone for sequence modeling, leveraging self-attention to produce contextualized token representations. These are typically aggregated into fixed-size vectors via pooling operations for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Sofiane Ennadir , Levente Zólyomi , Oleg Smirnov , Tianze Wang , John Pertoft , Filip Cornell , Lele Cao

Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Zheng-An Chen , Tao Luo

We investigate transient clustering dynamics in nonlocal aggregation-diffusion systems from an energetic perspective. Starting from a stochastic interacting particle system, we study the associated macroscopic McKean-Vlasov equation on the…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Nathalie Wehlitz , Richard Scherzer , Carsten Hartmann , Stefanie Winkelmann

Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ido Andrew Atad , Itamar Zimerman , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

Large-scale foundation models for scientific machine learning adapt to physical settings unseen during training, such as zero-shot transfer between turbulent scales. This phenomenon, in-context learning, challenges conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Anthony Bao , Jeffrey Lai , William Gilpin

Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Michael E. Sander , Pierre Ablin , Mathieu Blondel , Gabriel Peyré

We investigate active electrolytes within the mean-field level of description. The focus is on how the double-layer structure of passive, thermalized charges is affected by active dynamics of all constituting ions. One feature of active…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-05-23 Derek Frydel , Rudolf Podgornik

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Transformer has significantly propelled the development of artificial intelligence, and certainly the development of agents as well. We categorize attention structures of Transformer into two types based on the source of the input…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yongjin Cui , Xiaohui Fan , Huajun Chen

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Haixu Wu , Jialong Wu , Jiehui Xu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

We introduce a simple model of active transport for an ensemble of particles driven by an external shear flow. Active refers to the fact that the flow of the particles is modified by the distribution of particles itself. The model consists…

Exactly Solvable and Integrable Systems · Physics 2009-11-10 Cristobal Lopez

We use a mean-field-based transformer model to theoretically investigate how auxiliary variables, such as positional encoding, prevent mode collapse of self-attention mechanisms. The use of mean-field transformers to analyze the properties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Masaaki Imaizumi , Masanori Koyama , Noboru Isobe , Kohei Hayashi

We introduce the Momentum Transformer, an attention-based deep-learning architecture, which outperforms benchmark time-series momentum and mean-reversion trading strategies. Unlike state-of-the-art Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Kieran Wood , Sven Giegerich , Stephen Roberts , Stefan Zohren

We introduce a generalized attention mechanism for spherical domains, enabling Transformer architectures to natively process data defined on the two-dimensional sphere - a critical need in fields such as atmospheric physics, cosmology, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Boris Bonev , Max Rietmann , Andrea Paris , Alberto Carpentieri , Thorsten Kurth

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

This work presents a modification of the self-attention dynamics proposed by Geshkovski et al. (arXiv:2312.10794) to better reflect the practically relevant, causally masked attention used in transformer architectures for generative AI.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nikita Karagodin , Yury Polyanskiy , Philippe Rigollet

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan