[timlarshanson]

Yep. From what I've seen, if the head wants to do nothing, it can attend to itself = no inter-token communication.

Still, differential attention is pretty interesting & the benchmarking good, seems worth a try! It's in the same vein as linear or non-softmax attention, which also can work.

Note that there is an error below Eq. 1: W^V should be shape [d_model x d_model] not [d_model, 2*d_model] as in the Q, K matrices.

Idea: why not replace the lambda parameterization between softmax operations with something more general, like a matrix or MLP? E.g: Attention is the affine combination of N softmax attention operations (say, across heads). If the transformer learns an identity matrix here, then you know the original formulation was correct for the data; if it's sparse, these guys were right; if it's something else entirely then who knows...