Quantum Doubly Stochastic Transformers
Fuente:
arXiv
Enregistré dans:
| Auteurs principaux: | , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
|
| Sujets: | |
| Accès en ligne: | |
| Tags: |
Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
|
| _version_ | 1866914143094702080 |
|---|---|
| author | Born, Jannis Skogh, Filip Rhrissorrakrai, Kahn Utro, Filippo Wagner, Nico Sobczyk, Aleksandros |
| author_facet | Born, Jannis Skogh, Filip Rhrissorrakrai, Kahn Utro, Filippo Wagner, Nico Sobczyk, Aleksandros |
| contents | At the core of the Transformer, the softmax normalizes the attention matrix to be right stochastic. Previous research has shown that this often de-stabilizes training and that enforcing the attention matrix to be doubly stochastic (through Sinkhorn's algorithm) consistently improves performance across different tasks, domains and Transformer flavors. However, Sinkhorn's algorithm is iterative, approximative, non-parametric and thus inflexible w.r.t. the obtained doubly stochastic matrix (DSM). Recently, it has been proven that DSMs can be obtained with a parametric quantum circuit, yielding a novel quantum inductive bias for DSMs with no known classical analogue. Motivated by this, we demonstrate the feasibility of a hybrid classical-quantum doubly stochastic Transformer (QDSFormer) that replaces the softmax in the self-attention layer with a variational quantum circuit. We study the expressive power of the circuit and find that it yields more diverse DSMs that better preserve information than classical operators. Across multiple small-scale object recognition tasks, we find that our QDSFormer consistently surpasses both a standard ViT and other doubly stochastic Transformers. Beyond the Sinkformer, this comparison includes a novel quantum-inspired doubly stochastic Transformer (based on QR decomposition) that can be of independent interest. Our QDSFormer also shows improved training stability and lower performance variation suggesting that it may mitigate the notoriously unstable training of ViTs on small-scale data. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_16275 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Quantum Doubly Stochastic Transformers Born, Jannis Skogh, Filip Rhrissorrakrai, Kahn Utro, Filippo Wagner, Nico Sobczyk, Aleksandros Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition At the core of the Transformer, the softmax normalizes the attention matrix to be right stochastic. Previous research has shown that this often de-stabilizes training and that enforcing the attention matrix to be doubly stochastic (through Sinkhorn's algorithm) consistently improves performance across different tasks, domains and Transformer flavors. However, Sinkhorn's algorithm is iterative, approximative, non-parametric and thus inflexible w.r.t. the obtained doubly stochastic matrix (DSM). Recently, it has been proven that DSMs can be obtained with a parametric quantum circuit, yielding a novel quantum inductive bias for DSMs with no known classical analogue. Motivated by this, we demonstrate the feasibility of a hybrid classical-quantum doubly stochastic Transformer (QDSFormer) that replaces the softmax in the self-attention layer with a variational quantum circuit. We study the expressive power of the circuit and find that it yields more diverse DSMs that better preserve information than classical operators. Across multiple small-scale object recognition tasks, we find that our QDSFormer consistently surpasses both a standard ViT and other doubly stochastic Transformers. Beyond the Sinkformer, this comparison includes a novel quantum-inspired doubly stochastic Transformer (based on QR decomposition) that can be of independent interest. Our QDSFormer also shows improved training stability and lower performance variation suggesting that it may mitigate the notoriously unstable training of ViTs on small-scale data. |
| title | Quantum Doubly Stochastic Transformers |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16275 |