Exact Flow Linear Attention: Exact Solution from Continuous-Time Dynamics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lei, Jingdi, Zhang, Di, Poria, Soujanya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lei, Jingdi
Zhang, Di
Poria, Soujanya
author_facet Lei, Jingdi
Zhang, Di
Poria, Soujanya
contents In this paper, we introduce Exact Flow Linear Attention~(EFLA), an exact-flow formulation of delta-rule linear attention. We show that the delta-rule update can be interpreted as an explicit Euler discretization of an underlying continuous-time system. EFLA replaces this first-order update with the exact closed-form flow. By exploiting the rank-1 structure of the dynamics matrix, both the matrix exponential and the input integral collapse to a simple update that preserves delta-rule linear attention's algebraic structure, parameter count, linear-time complexity, and chunkwise parallelism. This attention mechanism removes the Euler discretization error of the delta-rule dynamics without introducing additional parameters. Experiments on robustness tests, language modeling benchmarks, and the MAD synthetic benchmark show that EFLA improves stability under corrupted and high-energy inputs, reduces perplexity, and achieves stronger downstream performance compared to SSM and Euler-style baselines. These results establish exact-flow integration as a principled and scalable update mechanism for delta-rule linear attention.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12602
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exact Flow Linear Attention: Exact Solution from Continuous-Time Dynamics
Lei, Jingdi
Zhang, Di
Poria, Soujanya
Machine Learning
In this paper, we introduce Exact Flow Linear Attention~(EFLA), an exact-flow formulation of delta-rule linear attention. We show that the delta-rule update can be interpreted as an explicit Euler discretization of an underlying continuous-time system. EFLA replaces this first-order update with the exact closed-form flow. By exploiting the rank-1 structure of the dynamics matrix, both the matrix exponential and the input integral collapse to a simple update that preserves delta-rule linear attention's algebraic structure, parameter count, linear-time complexity, and chunkwise parallelism. This attention mechanism removes the Euler discretization error of the delta-rule dynamics without introducing additional parameters. Experiments on robustness tests, language modeling benchmarks, and the MAD synthetic benchmark show that EFLA improves stability under corrupted and high-energy inputs, reduces perplexity, and achieves stronger downstream performance compared to SSM and Euler-style baselines. These results establish exact-flow integration as a principled and scalable update mechanism for delta-rule linear attention.
title Exact Flow Linear Attention: Exact Solution from Continuous-Time Dynamics
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12602