arXiv AI

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606. 17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Modern Transformers Are Implicit Hybrids: From Functional Differentiation to Principled Hybrid Architecture Design

The paper proposes a principled way to design hybrid transformer architectures that combine Full Attention (FA) and Linear Attention (LA). By introducing two intervention metrics—RoPE Frequency Importance Score (RFIS) and RoPE Positional Dependence (RPD)—the authors identify a clear taxonomy of retrieval and positional heads, defining a Global Positional Band (GPBand) that aligns with training-length positional scales. Using these insights, they build a Head‑wise Hybrid Architecture (HwH) that assigns FA to global retrieval and LA to local positional modeling, achieving strong language modeling, improved retrieval, and superior zero‑shot long‑context extrapolation compared to standard Transformers and other hybrids.

By Runlin Shi, Bojian Yin, Guoqi Li
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Pattern Formation in Transformers

arXiv:2609.37921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What are the inductive biases of a Transformer architecture? Existing theory on how the forward pass shapes representations either considers whether Tr...

By Erkan Turan, Gaspard Abel, Maks Ovsjanikov
arXiv AI
Jun 26

Rotary Position Encodings for Graphs

arXiv:2509. 22259v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the extent to which rotary position encodings (RoPE), a recent transformer position encoding algorithm broadly adopted in large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers (ViTs), can be applied to graph-structured data.

By Isaac Reid, Arijit Sehanobish, Cederik H\"ofs, Bruno Mlodozeniec, Leonhard Vulpius, Federico Barbero, Adrian Weller, Krzysztof Choromanski, Richard E. Turner, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c
arXiv AI
Jun 4

A Unified Geometric Space for Topological Alignment Between Transformer-Based Models and Human Brain Networks

arXiv:2510. 24342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prior brain-AI alignment studies are typically constrained by specific inputs and tasks, limiting their ability to capture organizational properties across models with different modalities.

By Silin Chen, Yuzhong Chen, Caiwei Wang, Zifan Wang, Junhao Wang, Zifeng Jia, Keith M Kendrick, Tuo Zhang, Lin Zhao, Dezhong Yao, Tianming Liu, Xi Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Performance-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Transformers: An Approximation Theory Perspective

The paper examines how to allocate attention heads and head dimensions across Transformer layers to balance expressivity and efficiency. It provides a mathematical analysis of early layers’ role in information extraction and characterizes the trade‑off between head count and dimension under a fixed parameter budget. The authors prove a saturation effect of softmax activations, showing that increasing head dimensions yields diminishing returns, especially for long sequences, and propose strategies for efficient parameter allocation across layers.

By Ruoxi Yu, Haotian Jiang, Jingpu Cheng, Penghao Yu, Qianxiao Li, Zhong Li