Flow-based Spectral Kernel Learning for Nonstationary Attention

Abstract

Kernelized attention provides a useful perspective for understanding self-attention as a similarity-based aggregation mechanism, but existing approaches often rely on fixed or stationary kernels, limiting their ability to adapt the similarity structure to complex token interactions. In this paper, we propose flow-based spectral kernel attention (FSKA), a framework for learning expressive nonstationary attention kernels. FSKA formulates kernelized attention through spectral density learning and parameterizes the resulting bivariate spectral density with normalizing flows. This design enables flexible and regularizable kernel learning while remaining compatible with scalable linear-attention computation. We further show that expressive kernel learning enables a simplified attention design with removed query--key projections and fixed orthogonal value projections, resulting in a more parameter-efficient architecture. Controlled experiments on classification, ablation, and scalability profiling show that FSKA achieves competitive or improved performance over existing attention mechanisms, while reducing projection-related trainable parameters by approximately $40\%$--$47\%$ compared with most baselines and maintaining favorable linear-attention memory scaling. Code Available: https://github.com/ziyang18/FSKA.