arXiv Machine Learning By Michael Fore, James Mason Inder, Mrishika Nair, Praneetha Vaddamanu, Sharlina Keshava

Pooling Helps, Learned Weighting Hurts In-Context: Decomposing Group Attention

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The paper investigates the components of group attention used in the Chronos-2 time‑series forecasting model, which attends over variates of a group for both multivariate (MV) and in‑context learning (ICL) forecasting. By editing the attention matrix at inference, the authors separate the head into a V/O pathway that projects a weighted summary of the group and a Q/K pathway that determines the weights. They find that uniform pooling (V/O without Q/K weighting) improves performance in most sensor‑network configurations, while learned weighting helps MV but degrades ICL in many cases; applying uniform weighting in the first block alone benefits all tested ICL settings.

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