Understanding axial attention in TSFMs through single location regression
Abstract
Recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) increasingly rely on axial attention mechanisms, but despite their empirical success, the theoretical properties of axial attention remain largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we extend the Single Location Regression framework introduced in Marion et al. [2025] to 2D structured data, in order to study sparse information settings where a target depends on a small number of tokens. We formulate an analytically tractable axial attention-type predictor and rigorously analyze its statistical properties and training dynamics. We prove that under a specific asymptotic regime and with knowledge of the underlying oracle parameters, our predictor achieves Bayes optimality, whereas a class of semi-linear simplifications strictly fails to do so, underlining the role of the inner non-linearity. We prove that for a specific temperature scaling, Projected Gradient Descent converges globally to the optimal oracle parameters. Extensive numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings and highlight the critical role of inverse temperature scheduling in empirical convergence.
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