Comment by ianand
2 days ago
I'm not a fan of the database lookup analogy either.
The analogy I prefer when teaching attention is celestial mechanics. Tokens are like planets in (latent) space. The attention mechanism is like a kind of "gravity" where each token is influencing each other, pushing and pulling each other around in (latent) space to refine their meaning. But instead of "distance" and "mass", this gravity is proportional to semantic inter-relatedness and instead of physical space this is occurring in a latent space.
Then I think you’ll like our project which aims to find the missing link between transformers and swarm simulations:
https://github.com/danielvarga/transformer-as-swarm
Basically a boid simulation where a swarm of birds can collectively solve MNIST. The goal is not some new SOTA architecture, it is to find the right trade-off where the system already exhibits complex emergent behavior while the swarming rules are still simple.
It is currently abandoned due to a serious lack of free time (*), but I would consider collaborating with anyone willing to put in some effort.
(*) In my defense, I’m not slacking meanwhile: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26543 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16522 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5p3VEOWza8
This is an excellent analogy! Thank you!