Refinement Symmetry in Multimodal Transformers
Attention weights depend on token counts, which change with the representation of a signal. We study refinement symmetry: splitting a representation while preserving content, position, visible context, and total mass should preserve its contribution. Building on proportional and quadrature attention, we show that split invariance forces the local mass factor to be linear for any fixed positive attention kernel, provided that factor is nondecreasing. For changed representations, a physical coupling bounds attention error by separating feature change from weight reallocation. In Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, duplicating half the visual tokens threefold changes 255 of 3,586 MVBench answers under standard...
| Authors | Yuhao Du, Shunian Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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