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arXiv · 2606.19538

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

Ashim Dhor·Rasel Mondal·Pin-Yu Chen
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Abstract

Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases -- locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction -- and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

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Ashim Dhor, Rasel Mondal, Pin-Yu Chen. 2026-06-27. ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19538

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