arXiv Machine Learning

L\'evy Attention: Single-Pass Predictive Uncertainty for Continuous-Time Attention

arXiv:2608. 19171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep models for irregularly-sampled time series answer queries at arbitrary continuous timestamps, yet report nothing about how far each answer should be trusted.

arXiv AI
Jul 22

Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning

arXiv:2411. 16073v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers.

By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv AI
Sep 28

PolicyAttention: Softmax Attention Implements Policy Mirror Descent for Closed-Loop Control

The paper investigates whether causal softmax attention can realize policy mirror descent (PMD) as a repeated controller rather than a one‑step algebraic identity. It constructs a fixed causal‑softmax actor–environment–one‑step‑critic protocol, detailing actor, routing, sampling, and normalization residuals, and shows that a frozen one‑step audit model closely approximates PMD. Empirical results demonstrate that the learned actor with an exact one‑step critic achieves median policy loss only about 5% higher than the exact PMD oracle across multiple control settings.

By Yuhe Sui, Yingzhi Tang, Shufang Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 28

From Attention Sensitivity to Layer Role: Revisiting Mixed-Precision Quantization of Transformers

The paper investigates post‑training quantization of transformer attention blocks by optimizing a joint loss over the Q, K, V projections rather than individual weight matrices. Using this joint attention‑based objective (JAB), the authors achieve significant compression on Mistral‑7B, recovering 77‑90% of the performance gap at 3 bits, but the method fails when MLP layers are included. A role‑aware offset rule that ignores sensitivity estimates outperforms JAB on GPT‑2 and full Mistral‑7B, demonstrating that the matrix a weight belongs to is more critical than sensitivity metrics.