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Linear Algebra Foundations of Efficient Attention: A Phase Reversal in Rank Collapse Under SVD Compression

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 6, 2026 · UTC

Linear algebra provides the framework of concepts (matrix rank, singular value decomposition (SVD), and eigendecomposition) that modern artificial intelligence employs to encode, compress, and propagate information through neural networks. This paper unifies fourteen separate peer-reviewed works analyzing the usage of these techniques in the context of transformer-based foundation model research, focusing on three areas of the topic: derivations and properties of self-attention matrices' output rank, compression methods that purposefully utilize this phenomenon, and the low-rank key-value (KV)

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T21:12:06.801Z. This is not the publication date.