Revisiting Transformer Layer Parameterization Through Causal Energy Minimization

📰 ArXiv cs.AI

arXiv:2605.07588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer blocks typically combine multi-head attention (MHA) for token mixing with gated MLPs for token-wise feature transformation, yet many choices in their parameterization remain largely empirical. We introduce Causal Energy Minimization (CEM), a framework that recasts Transformer layers as optimization steps on conditional energy functions while explicitly accounting for layer parameterization. Extending prior energy-based interpretations

Published 11 May 2026

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Title: Revisiting Transformer Layer Parameterization Through Causal Energy Minimization

Abstract:
arXiv:2605.07588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer blocks typically combine multi-head attention (MHA) for token mixing with gated MLPs for token-wise feature transformation, yet many choices in their parameterization remain largely empirical. We introduce Causal Energy Minimization (CEM), a framework that recasts Transformer layers as optimization steps on conditional energy functions while explicitly accounting for layer parameterization. Extending prior energy-based interpretations
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