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arxiv:2503.10632

Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention: Is Learnable Attention Better For Vision Transformers?

Published on Mar 13
ยท Submitted by maitysubhajit on Mar 17
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Abstract

Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) are a remarkable innovation consisting of learnable activation functions with the potential to capture more complex relationships from data. Although KANs are useful in finding symbolic representations and continual learning of one-dimensional functions, their effectiveness in diverse machine learning (ML) tasks, such as vision, remains questionable. Presently, KANs are deployed by replacing multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) in deep network architectures, including advanced architectures such as vision Transformers (ViTs). In this paper, we are the first to design a general learnable Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention (KArAt) for vanilla ViTs that can operate on any choice of basis. However, the computing and memory costs of training them motivated us to propose a more modular version, and we designed particular learnable attention, called Fourier-KArAt. Fourier-KArAt and its variants either outperform their ViT counterparts or show comparable performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K datasets. We dissect these architectures' performance and generalization capacity by analyzing their loss landscapes, weight distributions, optimizer path, attention visualization, and spectral behavior, and contrast them with vanilla ViTs. The goal of this paper is not to produce parameter- and compute-efficient attention, but to encourage the community to explore KANs in conjunction with more advanced architectures that require a careful understanding of learnable activations. Our open-source code and implementation details are available on: https://subhajitmaity.me/KArAt

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Vision Transformers and Self-Attentions have been there for half a decade now. While the interactions between queries and keys give us meaningful interactions between different regions of the image, we delve into finding a better way of representing and interpreting the interactions using learnable attention. Precisely, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks and their capabilities of learning and modeling flexible functions led us to design a learnable attention function to model the query-key interactions in Vision Transformers.

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