arxivcs.LGcs.CL2026-07-12
From Self-Attention to Connection Laplacian: A Unified Operator View of Transformers
Binbin Lin, Wei Chen, Yalun Li, Wenxiao Wang, Jieping Ye, Xiaofei He
Self-attention is a ubiquitous primitive in modern sequence models, yet its operator-level geometry is only partially understood. We view a token sequence as a vector field over the token-position graph and identify attention as a connection walk: messages are aggregated by a non…