Weak identifiability of multi-head attention parameters

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Let Θ\Theta be the parameter space of a multi-head attention (MHA) model with value dimension dvd_v and HH heads. Let SHS_H be the permutation group on the heads, and let

Ki=(GL⁡(dv)H)⋊SH.K_i=(\operatorname{GL}(d_v)^H)\rtimes S_H.

A parameter is weakly identifiable with respect to KiK_i when it is weakly identifiable after accounting for this symmetry group.

MHA weak identifiability conjecture. For every parameter θ∈Θ\theta\in\Theta of an MHA model, the parameter θ\theta is weakly identifiable with respect to the symmetry group

Ki=(GL⁡(dv)H)⋊SH.K_i=(\operatorname{GL}(d_v)^H)\rtimes S_H.

The conjecture asserts that the parameterization map is well behaved after quotienting by the value-output general linear transformations and head permutations. The source presents identifiability for attention mechanisms as a nascent field and motivates omitting query and key symmetries because equivariance is typically mediated through the value-output path or positional encoding.

References

Primary source

Vahid Shahverdi, Giovanni Luca Marchetti, Georg Bökman and Kathlén Kohn, “Identifiable Equivariant Networks are Layerwise Equivariant”, arXiv:2601.21645 (2026).

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