We study the inference-time behavior of deep linear encoder-only transformers through the lens of interacting particle systems. In this perspective, tokens are modeled as particles that interact dynamically through successive linear self-attention layers.
arXiv:2501. 18322v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens.
By Val\'erie Castin, Pierre Ablin, Jos\'e Antonio Carrillo, Gabriel Peyr\'e
arXiv:2607. 10677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-attention is a ubiquitous primitive in modern sequence models, yet its operator-level geometry is only partially understood.
By Binbin Lin, Wei Chen, Yalun Li, Wenxiao Wang, Jieping Ye, Xiaofei He
arXiv:2512. 21113v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective.
By Gregory Duth\'e, Nikolaos Evangelou, Wei Liu, Ioannis G. Kevrekidis, Eleni Chatzi
arXiv:2608. 08922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer layers generate state-dependent interaction networks: token representations determine the attention matrix, which in turn updates the representations.
By Qucheng Gao, Zuyi Yang, Xiao Chen
arXiv:2606. 07600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate data propagation through the Transformer, the machine learning architecture powering large language models, as a nonlinear control system on the space of probability measures.
By Albert Alcalde, Zhengping Ji, Enrique Zuazua
arXiv:2606. 15207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer architectures have dramatically advanced representation learning and inference in deep models through self-attention mechanisms.
By Cheng Zhang, Minnan Luo, Zesheng Yang, Ming Li, Yong-Jin Liu, Qinghua Zheng
We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning.
arXiv:2603. 17433v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer models have redefined sequence learning, yet dot-product self-attention introduces a quadratic token-mixing bottleneck for long-context time-series.
By Dibakar Sigdel
arXiv:2607. 11875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models.
By Tiberiu Musat, Tiago Pimentel, Nicholas Zucchet, Thomas Hofmann
arXiv:2606. 09287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how transformer representations evolve across layers, not merely what they encode, remains an open problem in mechanistic interpretability.
By Vishal Pandey, Gopal Singh
arXiv:2605. 25344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dense linear maps carry much of the parameter and computational burden of modern neural networks, yet their dense form leaves the organization of learned couplings implicit.
By Ying Lu, Peng-Fei Zhou, Qi-Xuan Fang, Pan Zhang, Shi-Ju Ran, Gang Su