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Related papers: The Diffusion-Attention Connection

200 papers

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

Do the rich representations of multi-modal diffusion transformers (DiTs) exhibit unique properties that enhance their interpretability? We introduce ConceptAttention, a novel method that leverages the expressive power of DiT attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Alec Helbling , Tuna Han Salih Meral , Ben Hoover , Pinar Yanardag , Duen Horng Chau

Contemporary diffusion models built upon U-Net or Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures have revolutionized image generation through transformer-based attention mechanisms. The prevailing paradigm has commonly employed self-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-01 ZiYi Dong , Chengxing Zhou , Weijian Deng , Pengxu Wei , Xiangyang Ji , Liang Lin

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

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

We develop a mathematical framework that interprets Transformer attention as an interacting particle system and studies its continuum (mean-field) limits. By idealizing attention on the sphere, we connect Transformer dynamics to Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Philippe Rigollet

Attention mechanisms have become a foundational component in diffusion models, significantly influencing their capacity across a wide range of generative and discriminative tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Litao Hua , Fan Liu , Jie Su , Xingyu Miao , Zizhou Ouyang , Zeyu Wang , Runze Hu , Zhenyu Wen , Bing Zhai , Yang Long , Haoran Duan , Yuan Zhou

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

We construct self-adjoint Laplacians and symmetric Markov semigroups on hyperbolic attractors, endowed with Gibbs $u$-measures. If the measure has full support, we can also conclude the existence of an associated symmetric diffusion…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2022-01-24 Shayan Alikhanloo , Michael Hinz

Transformers have achieved widespread and remarkable success, while the computational complexity of their attention modules remains a major bottleneck for vision tasks. Existing methods mainly employ 8-bit or 4-bit quantization to balance…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Chaodong Xiao , Zhengqiang Zhang , Lei Zhang

Geometry arising from two diffusion operators (smooth semi-elliptic, second order differential operators) on different spaces but intertwined by a smooth map is described. Particular cases arise from Riemannian submersions when the…

Differential Geometry · Mathematics 2016-07-22 K. D. Elworthy , Y. LeJan , Xue-Mei Li

We propose a probabilistic interpretation of transformers as unrolled inference steps assuming a probabilistic Laplacian Eigenmaps model from the ProbDR framework. Our derivation shows that at initialisation, transformers perform "linear"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aditya Ravuri , Neil D. Lawrence

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nan Ding , Xinjie Fan , Zhenzhong Lan , Dale Schuurmans , Radu Soricut

Networks are important structures used to model complex systems where interactions take place. In a basic network model, entities are represented as nodes, and interaction and relations among them are represented as edges. However, in a…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Mehmet Emin Aktas , Esra Akbas

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models capable of producing high-quality images from pure noise using a simple text prompt. While most methods which introduce additional spatial constraints into the generated images…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Zakaria Patel , Kirill Serkh

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

This research endeavors to offer insights into unlocking the further potential of transformer-based architectures. One of the primary motivations is to offer a geometric interpretation for the attention mechanism in transformers. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhongping Ji

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

Learning representations for structured data with certain geometries (e.g., observed or unobserved) is a fundamental challenge, wherein message passing neural networks (MPNNs) have become a de facto class of model solutions. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Qitian Wu , David Wipf , Junchi Yan

This paper identifies significant redundancy in the query-key interactions within self-attention mechanisms of diffusion transformer models, particularly during the early stages of denoising diffusion steps. In response to this observation,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Jiayi Guo , Dongchen Han , Qixiu Li , Duo Li , Yuhui Yuan , Ji Li , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang , Xiu Li