PoM: A Linear-Time Replacement for Attention with the Polynomial Mixer

arXiv:2604.06129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces the Polynomial Mixer (PoM), a novel token mixing mechanism with linear complexity that serves as a drop-in replacement for self-attention. PoM aggregates input tokens into a compact representation through a learned polynomial function, from which each token retrieves contextual information. We prove that PoM satisfies the contextual mapping property, ensuring that transformers equipped with PoM remain universal sequence-to-s