A mean-field kinetic theory derivation produces a closed-form U-shaped token retrieval profile that explains the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon in Transformers.
Perceptrons and localization of attention's mean-field landscape
5 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
The forward pass of a Transformer can be seen as an interacting particle system on the unit sphere: time plays the role of layers, particles that of token embeddings, and the unit sphere idealizes layer normalization. In some weight settings the system can even be seen as a gradient flow for an explicit energy, and one can make sense of the infinite context length (mean-field) limit thanks to Wasserstein gradient flows. In this paper we study the effect of the perceptron block in this setting, and show that critical points are generically atomic and localized on subsets of the sphere.
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AI weather models may simulate the atmosphere via particle positions in latent space whose updates follow gradient flow on a learned free energy functional rather than conventional physical equations.
Transformers converge pathwise to a stochastic particle system and SPDE in the scaling limit, exhibiting synchronization by noise and exponential energy dissipation when common noise is coercive relative to self-attention drift.
Derives forward and backward propagation-of-chaos bounds for finite vs. infinite-context transformers modeled as contextual flow maps, achieving Wasserstein rate n^{-1/d} generally and n^{-1/2} for transformer-like cases.
In the low-temperature regime, the token distribution in mean-field transformers concentrates onto the push-forward under a key-query-value projection with Wasserstein distance scaling as √(log(β+1)/β) exp(Ct) + exp(-ct).
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Kinetic theory for Transformers and the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon
A mean-field kinetic theory derivation produces a closed-form U-shaped token retrieval profile that explains the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon in Transformers.
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Quantifying Concentration Phenomena of Mean-Field Transformers in the Low-Temperature Regime
In the low-temperature regime, the token distribution in mean-field transformers concentrates onto the push-forward under a key-query-value projection with Wasserstein distance scaling as √(log(β+1)/β) exp(Ct) + exp(-ct).