Generalization Analysis of Transformers in Distribution Regression

Abstract In recent years, models based on the transformer architecture have seen widespread applications and have become one of the core tools in the field of deep learning. Numerous successful and efficient techniques, such as parameter-efficient fine-tuning and efficient scaling, have been proposed surrounding their applications to further enhance performance. However, the success of these strategies has always lacked the support of rigorous mathematical theory. To study the underlying mechanisms behind transformers and related techniques, we first propose a transformer learning framework motivated by distribution regression, with distributions being inputs, connect a two-stage sampling process with natural language processing, and present a mathematical formulation of the attention mechanism called attention operator. We demonstrate that by the attention operator, transformers can compress distributions into function representations without loss of information. Moreover, with the advantages of our novel attention operator, transformers exhibit a stronger capability to learn functionals with more complex structures than convolutional neural networks and fully connected networks. Finally, we obtain a generalization bound within the distribution regression framework. Throughout theoretical results, we further discuss some successful techniques emerging with large language models (LLMs), such as prompt tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and efficient scaling. We also provide theoretical insights behind these techniques within our novel analysis framework.