Learning Advanced Self-Attention for Linear Transformers in the Singular Value Domain

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wi, Hyowon, Choi, Jeongwhan, Park, Noseong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908362086547456
author Wi, Hyowon
Choi, Jeongwhan
Park, Noseong
author_facet Wi, Hyowon
Choi, Jeongwhan
Park, Noseong
contents Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. The key component of Transformers is self-attention, which learns the relationship between any two tokens in the input sequence. Recent studies have revealed that the self-attention can be understood as a normalized adjacency matrix of a graph. Notably, from the perspective of graph signal processing (GSP), the self-attention can be equivalently defined as a simple graph filter, applying GSP using the value vector as the signal. However, the self-attention is a graph filter defined with only the first order of the polynomial matrix, and acts as a low-pass filter preventing the effective leverage of various frequency information. Consequently, existing self-attention mechanisms are designed in a rather simplified manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method, called \underline{\textbf{A}}ttentive \underline{\textbf{G}}raph \underline{\textbf{F}}ilter (AGF), interpreting the self-attention as learning the graph filter in the singular value domain from the perspective of graph signal processing for directed graphs with the linear complexity w.r.t. the input length $n$, i.e., $\mathcal{O}(nd^2)$. In our experiments, we demonstrate that AGF achieves state-of-the-art performance on various tasks, including Long Range Arena benchmark and time series classification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_08516
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Advanced Self-Attention for Linear Transformers in the Singular Value Domain
Wi, Hyowon
Choi, Jeongwhan
Park, Noseong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. The key component of Transformers is self-attention, which learns the relationship between any two tokens in the input sequence. Recent studies have revealed that the self-attention can be understood as a normalized adjacency matrix of a graph. Notably, from the perspective of graph signal processing (GSP), the self-attention can be equivalently defined as a simple graph filter, applying GSP using the value vector as the signal. However, the self-attention is a graph filter defined with only the first order of the polynomial matrix, and acts as a low-pass filter preventing the effective leverage of various frequency information. Consequently, existing self-attention mechanisms are designed in a rather simplified manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method, called \underline{\textbf{A}}ttentive \underline{\textbf{G}}raph \underline{\textbf{F}}ilter (AGF), interpreting the self-attention as learning the graph filter in the singular value domain from the perspective of graph signal processing for directed graphs with the linear complexity w.r.t. the input length $n$, i.e., $\mathcal{O}(nd^2)$. In our experiments, we demonstrate that AGF achieves state-of-the-art performance on various tasks, including Long Range Arena benchmark and time series classification.
title Learning Advanced Self-Attention for Linear Transformers in the Singular Value Domain
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08516