English
Related papers

Related papers: The Mean-Field Dynamics of Transformers

200 papers

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

Despite the Transformer's dominance across machine learning, its architecture remains largely heuristic and lacks a unified theoretical foundation. We introduce Score-based Variational Flow (SVFlow), a continuous-time dynamical system for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Huadong Liao

To overcome the quadratic cost of self-attention, recent works have proposed various sparse attention modules, most of which fall under one of two groups: 1) sparse attention under a hand-crafted patterns and 2) full attention followed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Sungjun Cho , Seonwoo Min , Jinwoo Kim , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Seunghoon Hong

We develop an operator-based framework to coarse-grain interacting particle systems that exhibit clustering dynamics. Starting from the particle-based transfer operator, we first construct a sequence of reduced representations: the operator…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-04-10 Nathalie Wehlitz , Grigorios A. Pavliotis , Christof Schütte , Stefanie Winkelmann

Transformer models systematically favor certain token positions, yet the architectural origins of this position bias remain poorly understood. This bias is closely connected to the Lost-in-the-Middle phenomenon, where models underutilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Hanna Herasimchyk , Robin Labryga , Tomislav Prusina , Sören Laue

The Transformer model architecture has become one of the most widely used in deep learning and the attention mechanism is at its core. The standard attention formulation uses a softmax operation applied to a scaled dot product between query…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Hariprasath Govindarajan , Per Sidén , Jacob Roll , Fredrik Lindsten

Simulations of extended quantum systems are typically performed by extrapolating results of a sequence of finite-system-size simulations to the thermodynamic limit. In the quantum Monte Carlo community, twist-averaging was pioneered as an…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2022-12-14 Sergei Iskakov , Hanna Terletska , Emanuel Gull

We consider the gelation of particles which are permanently connected by random crosslinks, drawn from an ensemble of finite-dimensional continuum percolation. To average over the randomness, we apply the replica trick, and interpret the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-07 Kurt Broderix , Martin Weigt , Annette Zippelius

In this work, we present a generalized formulation of the Transformer algorithm by reinterpreting its core mechanisms within the framework of Path Integral formalism. In this perspective, the attention mechanism is recast as a process that…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-05-02 Won-Gi Paeng , Daesuk Kwon , Kyungwon Jeong , Honggyo Suh

Quantum phase transitions in many-body systems are fundamentally characterized by complex correlation structures, which pose computational challenges for conventional methods in large systems. To address this, we propose a hybrid…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-03 Jin-Long Chen , Xin Li , Zhang-Qi Yin

Rich out of equilibrium collective dynamics of strongly interacting large assemblies emerge in many areas of science. Some intriguing and not fully understood examples are the glassy arrest in atomic, molecular or colloidal systems,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-05-03 Leticia F. Cugliandolo

The ubiquitous occurrence of cluster patterns in nature still lacks a comprehensive understanding. It is known that the dynamics of many such natural systems is captured by ensembles of Stuart-Landau oscillators. Here, we investigate…

Pattern Formation and Solitons · Physics 2019-02-13 Felix P. Kemeth , Sindre W. Haugland , Katharina Krischer

Transformers have dominated sequence processing tasks for the past seven years -- most notably language modeling. However, the inherent quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism remains a significant bottleneck as context length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Alexander M. Fichtl , Jeremias Bohn , Josefin Kelber , Edoardo Mosca , Georg Groh

Transformers are increasingly dominating multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results thanks to their ability to contextualize information using the self-attention and co-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Hila Chefer , Shir Gur , Lior Wolf

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

We consider two mean-field like models which belong to the universality class of absorbing phase transitions with a conserved field. In both cases we derive analytically the order parameter as function of the control parameter and of an…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-24 S. Lubeck , A. Hucht

We consider mean-field models for data--clustering problems starting from a generalization of the bounded confidence model for opinion dynamics. The microscopic model includes information on the position as well as on additional features of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-03-16 Michael Herty , Lorenzo Pareschi , Giuseppe Visconti

Transformers have become the dominant architecture in modern machine learning, yet the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Raphaël Barboni , Maarten V. de Hoop , Takashi Furuya , Gabriel Peyré

The dynamic behavior of cluster algorithms is analyzed in the classical mean field limit. Rigorous analytical results below $T_c$ establish that the dynamic exponent has the value $z_{sw}=1$ for the Swendsen-Wang algorithm and $z_{uw}=0$…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-28 N. Persky , R. Ben-Av , I. Kanter , E. Domany

Transformer is a powerful model for text understanding. However, it is inefficient due to its quadratic complexity to input sequence length. Although there are many methods on Transformer acceleration, they are still either inefficient on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie