paper
arXiv cs.LG
October 28th, 2026 at 4:00 AM

Continuum Attention

arXiv:2610.20586v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional causal attention aggregates values at discrete memory positions. We introduce Continuum Attention (CA), in which neighboring key and value vectors define a continuous, piecewise linear memory trajectory and each query retrieves information by normalized integration over its visible prefix. The segment integrals have closed forms in exponential moments, yielding analytically differentiable attention without numerical quadrature. The resulting operator preserves causal masking, normalized nonnegative effective weights, and the standard Transformer decoder structure. Controlled byte level experiments favor exact continuous integration over matched softmax attention. We additionally evaluate data efficiency, out of domain language modeling, zero-shot multiple choice prediction, robustness, and multilingual generalization. In multilingual evaluation, CA consistently outperforms all baselines across every evaluated language, achieving an average 5.8% reduction in bits per byte (BPB) relative to the strongest baseline.

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Canonical link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20586