arXiv Machine Learning

Softmax Attention with Any Temperature in Fixed Dimension: Matching the Best Known Maximum-Inner-Product Bounds

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 27

Approaching I/O-optimality for Approximate Attention

arXiv:2605.23751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the I/O complexity of attention in large language models. Given query-key-value matrices $Q,K,V\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, and a machine...

By P\'al Andr\'as Papp, Aleksandros Sobczyk, Anastasios Zouzias
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Conic Certification of Transformer Attention

The paper introduces a conic programming framework for certifying transformer attention, providing guarantees on how far an attention head’s output can shift under input perturbations. It shows that the main challenge lies in the bilinear interaction between varying queries and keys, making certification NP-hard over boxes and inapproximable when logits can shift by a constant. The authors present an exponential cone moment relaxation that yields a quadratic error bound in the perturbation radius, and demonstrate that this approach outperforms linear bound propagation on GPT‑2, achieving tighter bounds and matching predicted second‑order accuracy.

By Masoud Ataei
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Expanding Attention: A Taylor-Series Route to Linear-Time Transformers with a Fixed Number of Recurrent States

arXiv:2610. 20637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We expand the exponential kernel of attention into a truncated Taylor series of $n$ terms and factorize each term into a tensor-power inner product, which collapses the causal history into exactly $n$ recurrent states, each updated by one rank-one outer product per token and independent of context length $N$.

By Zicong Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Attention via Black-Box Vector Search

arXiv:2610.10135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse attention mechanisms estimate attention over $n$ tokens using a small subset of keys. Many existing approaches use maximum inner product searc...

By Stepan Zharkov, Krish Singal, Ashwin Padaki, Alexandr Andoni
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Efficiently Approximating Attention Is Hard

arXiv:2609.37261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Softmax attention is ubiquitous in modern machine learning, but its quadratic scaling with sequence length makes it costly. To reduce this cost, attent...

By Lukas Haverbeck, Carmen Amo Alonso, Andres Felipe Posada-Moreno, Sebastian Trimpe, Marco Pavone
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Token Sample Complexity of Attention

arXiv:2512. 10656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As context windows in large language models continue to expand, it is essential to characterize how attention behaves at extreme sequence lengths.

By L\'ea Bohbot, Cyril Letrouit, Gabriel Peyr\'e, Fran\c{c}ois-Xavier Vialard
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Toward a First-Principles Update Geometry for the Language-Model Head

The paper proposes a new update geometry for the language‑model head by treating the head and softmax as a single module and using Hilbert’s projective distance to measure functional change. It replaces the spectral norm with the Euclidean row diameter, derives a tractable RowNorm update rule, and demonstrates that RowNorm substantially reduces step diameters and Hilbert perturbations while only slightly increasing validation loss.

By Aditya Somasundaram, Charles Guille-Escuret, Alexander Moreno, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Attention over noisy examples: generalization and memorization in the exponential Hopfield network

arXiv:2610. 22191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Hebbian learning from examples a Hopfield network of $N$ neurons is not supplied with the $K$ archetypes it has to retrieve but with $M$ blurred examples of each, of quality $r$, and whether it can infer them depends on the load $\alpha=K/N$ (interference among them) and on the dataset entropy $\rho=(1-r^2)/(Mr^2)$ (how little the examples say about them).

By Francesco Alemanno