SchoenbAt: Rethinking Attention with Polynomial basis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Yuhan, Ding, Lizhong, Yang, Yuwan, Guo, Xuewei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Guo, Yuhan
Ding, Lizhong
Yang, Yuwan
Guo, Xuewei
author_facet Guo, Yuhan
Ding, Lizhong
Yang, Yuwan
Guo, Xuewei
contents Kernelized attention extends the attention mechanism by modeling sequence correlations through kernel functions, making significant progresses in optimizing attention. Under the guarantee of harmonic analysis theory, kernel functions can be expanded with basis functions, inspiring random feature-based approaches to enhance the efficiency of kernelized attention while maintaining predictive performance. However, current random feature-based works are limited to the Fourier basis expansions under Bochner's theorem. We propose Schoenberg's theorem-based attention (SchoenbAt), which approximates dot-product kernelized attention with the polynomial basis under Schoenberg's theorem via random Maclaurin features and applies a two-stage regularization to constrain the input space and restore the output scale, acting as a drop-in replacement of dot-product kernelized attention. Our theoretical proof of the unbiasedness and concentration error bound of SchoenbAt supports its efficiency and accuracy as a kernelized attention approximation, which is also empirically validated under various random feature dimensions. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that SchoenbAt significantly enhances computational speed while preserving competitive performance in terms of precision, outperforming several efficient attention methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SchoenbAt: Rethinking Attention with Polynomial basis
Guo, Yuhan
Ding, Lizhong
Yang, Yuwan
Guo, Xuewei
Machine Learning
Kernelized attention extends the attention mechanism by modeling sequence correlations through kernel functions, making significant progresses in optimizing attention. Under the guarantee of harmonic analysis theory, kernel functions can be expanded with basis functions, inspiring random feature-based approaches to enhance the efficiency of kernelized attention while maintaining predictive performance. However, current random feature-based works are limited to the Fourier basis expansions under Bochner's theorem. We propose Schoenberg's theorem-based attention (SchoenbAt), which approximates dot-product kernelized attention with the polynomial basis under Schoenberg's theorem via random Maclaurin features and applies a two-stage regularization to constrain the input space and restore the output scale, acting as a drop-in replacement of dot-product kernelized attention. Our theoretical proof of the unbiasedness and concentration error bound of SchoenbAt supports its efficiency and accuracy as a kernelized attention approximation, which is also empirically validated under various random feature dimensions. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that SchoenbAt significantly enhances computational speed while preserving competitive performance in terms of precision, outperforming several efficient attention methods.
title SchoenbAt: Rethinking Attention with Polynomial basis
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12252