Balancing Fidelity and Diversity in Diffusion Models via Symmetric Attention Decomposition: Hopfield Perspective

arXiv:2605.27476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We characterize the pre-softmax attention matrix $\mathbf{QK^\top}$ in transformers as an associative memory matrix encoding pairwise associations between input features. By decomposing this matrix into its symmetric and skew-symmetric parts, we interpret the symmetric component as governing the structure of the energy landscape, and the skew-symmetric component as driving circulation on that landscape. Leveraging the energy formulation induced by