← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2605.08811 · v2
Learning Theory of Transformers: Local-to-Global Approximation via Softmax Partition of Unity
首次提交 2026-05-09 17:02
版本更新 2026-11-09 11:19
雷达观测 2026-11-10 13:18
摘要
This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for Transformers that builds local approximations of the target function and aggregates them into a global approximation via softmax partition of unity (POU). This approach leverages the attention mechanism to achieve spatial localization through affine transformations of the input. The softmax activation plays a crucial role in aggregating local approximations to a global output. From an approximation perspective, we prove that a dense Transformer equipped with only two encoder blocks and standard single-hidden-layer point-wise feed-forward networks can achieve a uniform $\varepsilon$-approximation error for $α$-Hölder continuous functions with $α\in (0,1]$ using $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-d/α})$ total parameters. Building upon this approximation guarantee, we establish a near minimax-optimal generalization error bound of order $\mathcal{O}\big(n^{-\frac{2α}{2α+d}} \log n\big)$ for the empirical risk minimizer, where $n$ is the training data size. The Transformer architecture studied in this paper uses native softmax attention and sinusoidal positional encodings, with a fixed depth of two encoder blocks. Finally, numerical experiments reveal spatially localized, Gaussian-like attention weights that emerge during training, resembling our Softmax POU weights.
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v2 · 2026-11-09 11:19 · 最新观测版本
Learning Theory of Transformers: Local-to-Global Approximation via Softmax Partition of Unity
This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for Transformers that builds local approximations of the target function and aggregates them into a global approximation via softmax partition of unity (POU). This approach leverages the attention mechanism to achieve spatial localization through affine transformations of the input. The softmax activation plays a crucial role in aggregating local approximations to a global output. From an approximation perspective, we prove that a dense Transformer equipped with only two encoder blocks and standard single-hidden-layer point-wise feed-forward networks can achieve a uniform $\varepsilon$-approximation error for $α$-Hölder continuous functions with $α\in (0,1]$ using $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-d/α})$ total parameters. Building upon this approximation guarantee, we establish a near minimax-optimal generalization error bound of order $\mathcal{O}\big(n^{-\frac{2α}{2α+d}} \log n\big)$ for the empirical risk minimizer, where $n$ is the training data size. The Transformer architecture studied in this paper uses native softmax attention and sinusoidal positional encodings, with a fixed depth of two encoder blocks. Finally, numerical experiments reveal spatially localized, Gaussian-like attention weights that emerge during training, resembling our Softmax POU weights.
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