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: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
Selective state space models (SSMs) use a recurrence to mix token information, a process analogous to attention in transformers. By modeling token evolution as an ordinary differential equation and applying input‑to‑state stability, the study proves that SSMs exhibit local exponential stability of consensus equilibria and delineates their domain of attraction for time‑varying weight matrices. Experiments on a pretrained Mamba‑2 model reveal that the output gate controls the degree of consensus, preventing tokens from fully converging.
By Jo\~ao Pedro Silvestre, \'Alvaro Rodr\'iguez Abella, Paulo Tabuada
Autoregressive transformers trained on limited trajectories of nonlinear dynamical systems can extrapolate to unseen parameter regimes, reproducing period-doubling cascades, chaotic dynamics, and attractor structures with high fidelity. In the logistic map, the model captures successive period doublings up to period 128, achieving a scaling ratio within $5 imes10^{-4}$ of the Feigenbaum constant. The study also shows how control‑parameter information is processed via attention, shaping the closed‑loop dynamics during training.
By Yilun Liu, Yi Zhang, Ganyu Wu, Sikuan Yan, Mengyue Wang, Alois Knoll, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2601.19567v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We address the intrinsic dimensionality (ID) of high-dimensional trajectories, comprising $n_s = 4\,000\,000$ data points, of the Fermi-Pasta...
By Gionni Marchetti
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:2609.28448v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a minimal recurrent transformer with $N$ normalized tokens, $Q=K=I$, and a negative value map $V=-I$. Similar...
By Qucheng Gao, Zuyi Yang, Xiao Chen
arXiv:2609.36230v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the dynamical behavior of tokens in transformers from a control-theoretic perspective. Our model includes the feed-forward layer present after...
By Thomas Jacob Maranzatto, Semih Akkoc, Sennur Ulukus
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