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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Jie, Mao, Mao-Hsuan, Chiu, Bo-Wei, Sun, Min-Te
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00585
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Table of Contents:
  • Recent advances in deep learning have established Transformer architectures as the predominant modeling paradigm. Central to the success of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism, which scores the similarity between query and key matrices to modulate a value matrix. This operation bears striking similarities to digraph convolution, prompting an investigation into whether digraph convolution could serve as an alternative to self-attention. In this study, we formalize this concept by introducing a synthetic unitary digraph convolution based on the digraph Fourier transform. The resulting model, which we term Converter, effectively converts a Transformer into a Directed Graph Neural Network (DGNN) form. We have tested Converter on Long-Range Arena benchmark, long document classification, and DNA sequence-based taxonomy classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that Converter achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency and architectural simplicity, which establishes it as a lightweight yet powerful Transformer variant.