arXiv AI By Aakash Sarkar, Ananya Mukherjee, Motoshige Sato

Relational Composition as Parallel Transport: What Per-Entity Frames Force in Attention

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The paper investigates how treating each entity in a graph or language model as having its own coordinate frame—viewed as a symmetry—constrains the form of attention mechanisms. It shows that with orthogonal transports, invariant attention scores depend only on norms and transported inner products, while equivariant messages lie in the span of the entity vectors and their transported counterparts. The authors demonstrate that standard attention corresponds to a flat shared frame, and that incorporating per‑entity frames allows relations to be represented as operators that compose via parallel transport, yielding empirical gains on synthetic relational tasks and natural language benchmarks.

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