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A Mathematical Theory of Attention

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arxiv 2007.02876 v2 pith:VM354Q7L submitted 2020-07-06 stat.ML cs.LG

classification stat.MLcs.LG
keywords attentionself-attentionmodelnetworkstheoryableacrossactually
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Attention is a powerful component of modern neural networks across a wide variety of domains. However, despite its ubiquity in machine learning, there is a gap in our understanding of attention from a theoretical point of view. We propose a framework to fill this gap by building a mathematically equivalent model of attention using measure theory. With this model, we are able to interpret self-attention as a system of self-interacting particles, we shed light on self-attention from a maximum entropy perspective, and we show that attention is actually Lipschitz-continuous (with an appropriate metric) under suitable assumptions. We then apply these insights to the problem of mis-specified input data; infinitely-deep, weight-sharing self-attention networks; and more general Lipschitz estimates for a specific type of attention studied in concurrent work.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 8 citations worldwide. Full citation record

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  4. Physical models realizing the transformer architecture of large language models

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    The paper shows that any transformer's autoregressive token distribution can be realized as sequential measurements on a Fock space state, but the construction is an exact embedding with no new predictions.

  5. Lipschitz Continuity in Deep Learning: A Systematic Review of Theoretical Foundations, Estimation Methods, Regularization Approaches, and Certifiable Robustness

    stat.ML 2026-07 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A systematic survey of Lipschitz continuity in deep learning that corrects sigmoid (1/4) and softmax (1/2) Lipschitz constants and proves a sum-over-paths Lipschitz bound for additively-evaluated DAG networks.

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