All Routes Lead to Collapse
Attention sinks, representation collapse, and norm stratification are treated as transformer-specific pathologies. We show they are not specific to attention: they are what content-based routing does under a fixed similarity metric. We give a reframing identity: softmax attention is Boltzmann-weighted aggregation over Euclidean distances with constant key norms, so its score omits a $-\|k\|^2$ term and is blind to key magnitude. This predicts that any router whose metric is ill-matched to its representations should compensate, by concentrating its routing and collapsing the routed representations. We test it on routers that score and aggregate over different axes: softmax attention over t...
| Authors | K. R. Balasubramanian |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 June 2026 |
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