Precision Tracked Transformer via Kalman Filtering, Kriging and Process Noise
The Transformer is the foundational building block of modern AI, yet offers no principled handling of \emph{uncertainty}, which is prevalent in real applications: cold-start tokens with sparse histories in sequential recommendation, heterogeneous signal quality in language models, and attention sinks induced by unconstrained softmax. Every token is treated with uniform confidence. We show this uniformity is a degenerate case of our \emph{Bayesian Filtering Transformer} (BFT): attention becomes precision-weighted kriging, the residual connection becomes a Kalman update with adaptive gain, and the FFN becomes a dynamics model propagating precision via a Jacobian--plus--process-noise rule. Observation precision comes from a parameter-free Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) estimator with a conjugate Bayesian prior. BFT replaces any Transformer layer with negligible overhead. On sequential recommendation, BFT applied to three major architectures yields significant gains on six benchmarks, with the largest improvements on cold-start users and rare items where uncertainty is highest. On supervised fine-tuning of large language models with noisy data, BFT improves robustness in two regimes: noisy supervision (token-label corruption in question answering) and noisy context (retrieval-augmented QA with real RAG distractors). A single principled modification -- restoring precision -- unlocks substantial headroom across both classical sequence-modeling and modern LLM regimes.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Sequential RecommendationQuestion AnsweringSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Multiway Ensemble Kalman Filter
In this work, we study the emergence of sparsity and multiway structures in second-order statistical characterizations of dynamical processes governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). We consider several state-o…
Adaptive Beam Tracking with the Unscented Kalman Filter for Millimeter Wave Communication
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication links for 5G cellular technology require high beamforming gain to overcome channel impairments and achieve high throughput. While much work has focused on estimating mmWave channels…
Kalman Linear Attention: Parallel Bayesian Filtering For Efficient Language Modelling and State Tracking
State-space language models such as Mamba and gated linear attention (GLA) offer linear-complexity, parallelisable alternatives to transformers, but their linear state updates limit expressivity and robust state tracking…
Language ModellingInverse Extended Kalman Filter -- Part I: Fundamentals
Recent advances in counter-adversarial systems have garnered significant research attention to inverse filtering from a Bayesian perspective. For example, interest in estimating the adversary's Kalman filter tracked esti…
State Space ModelsOptimal Sensing Precision in Ensemble and Unscented Kalman Filtering
We consider the problem of selecting an optimal set of sensor precisions to estimate the states of a non-linear dynamical system using an Ensemble Kalman filter and an Unscented Kalman filter, which uses random and deter…