Energy-Gated Attention: Spectral Salience as an Inductive Bias for Transformer Attention
Standard transformer attention computes pairwise similarity between queries and keys, treating all tokens as equally salient regardless of their intrinsic informational content. In turbulent fluid dynamics, coherent structures -- the energetically dominant, spatially organized patterns that persist amid background chaos -- carry a disproportionate fraction of total energy and govern all transport. We propose that tokens play an analogous role in transformer attention: informationally dense positions (morphological boundaries, syntactic heads, discourse markers) concentrate spectral energy and should attract proportionally more attention than background tokens (function words, repeated pat...
| Authors | Athanasios Zeris |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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