English

Beyond Parallelism: Synergistic Computational Graph Effects in Multi-Head Attention

Machine Learning 2025-11-11 v2

Abstract

Multi-head attention powers Transformer networks, the primary deep learning architecture behind the success of large language models (LLMs). Yet, the theoretical advantages of multi-head versus single-head attention, beyond mere parallel processing, remain underexplored. In this paper, we reframe multi-head attention as a system of potentially synergistic computational graphs, where each head functions as a feedforward directed acyclic graph (DAG) with a common sink state. We provide intuition and preliminary theoretical analysis of mixing time and minimax fidelity in this framework. Our results show that multi-head attention can synergistically enhance information propagation, yielding faster mixing times and minimax fidelity amplification under specific head-diversity conditions. Finally, we train single-head and multi-head Transformers, each with the same total number of parameters, on sequence manipulation tasks and empirically verify the predicted effects. The code is available at https://github.com/haitzsaezdeocariz/beyondparallelism.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.02944,
  title  = {Beyond Parallelism: Synergistic Computational Graph Effects in Multi-Head Attention},
  author = {Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.02944},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

16 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables. Accepted at NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:45:34.091Z