Transformers through the lens of support-preserving maps between measures

Transformers are deep architectures that define ``in-context maps'' which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In previous work, we studied the ability of these architectures to handle an arbitrarily large number of context tokens. To mathematically, uniformly analyze their expressivity, we considered the case that the mappings are conditioned on a context represented by a probability distribution which becomes discrete for a finite number of tokens. Modeling neural networks as maps on probability measures has multiple applications, such as studying Wasserstein regularity, proving generalization bounds and doing a mean-field limit analysis of the dynamics of interacting particles as they go through the network. In this work, we study the question what kind of maps between measures are transformers. We fully characterize the properties of maps between measures that enable these to be represented in terms of in-context maps via a push forward. On the one hand, these include transformers; on the other hand, transformers universally approximate representations with any continuous in-context map. These properties are preserving the cardinality of support and that the regular part of their Fréchet derivative is uniformly continuous. Moreover, we show that the solution map of the Vlasov equation, which is of nonlocal transport type, for interacting particle systems in the mean-field regime for the Cauchy problem satisfies the conditions on the one hand and, hence, can be approximated by a transformer; on the other hand, we prove that the measure-theoretic self-attention has the properties that ensure that the infinite depth, mean-field measure-theoretic transformer can be identified with a Vlasov flow.