Statistics and Data Science Seminar - Philippe Rigollet November 10, 2025 4:00pm — 5:00pm Location: In Person - Posner Hall 151 Speaker: PHILIPPE RIGOLLET , Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Core Member, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://www-math.mit.edu/~rigollet A Mathematical Perspective on Transformers Since their introduction in 2017, Transformers have revolutionized large language models and the broader field of deep learning. Central to this success is the groundbreaking self-attention mechanism. In this presentation, I’ll introduce a mathematical framework that casts this mechanism as a mean-field interacting particle system, revealing a desirable long-time clustering behavior. This perspective leads to a trove of fascinating questions with unexpected connections to Kuramoto oscillators, sphere packing, Wasserstein gradient flows, and slow dynamics.—Philippe Rigollet is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at MIT and a Core Member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. His research explores the foundations of modern machine learning, with a particular focus on optimal transport and the emerging theory of transformer architectures. For More Information: mmenk@andrew.cmu.edu Add event to Google Add event to iCal
