Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer

Abstract:Transformer architectures have dramatically advanced representation learning and inference in deep models through self-attention mechanisms. In parallel,associative memory (AM) frameworks map representations onto energy landscapes, offering interpretable retrieval mechanisms. However, their continuous-time inference dynamics lack the biological plausibility of classical Continuous Attractor Neural Networks (CANNs). To bridge this gap, we propose Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer (CDAT), which couples a mixture von Mises-Fisher (Mo-vMF) attention energy with a Hopfield refinement energy, while augmenting energy descent with a CANN-inspired excitation-inhibition modulation. CDAT instantiates a topology-constrained dynamical system whose couplings encode relational structure among tokens, thereby linking attractor-style dynamics to modern energy-based attention. We further provide a constructive dissipation analysis to formally establish their controlled inference dynamics. Benefiting from these robust and structured dynamics, CDAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks in graph anomaly detection and graph classification.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

arXiv:2606.15207 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.15207v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.15207 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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