  In this paper, we contend that the objective of representation learning is to
compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens,
towards a mixture of low-dimensional Gaussian distributions supported on
incoherent subspaces. The quality of the final representation can be measured
by a unified objective function called sparse rate reduction. From this
perspective, popular deep networks such as transformers can be naturally viewed
as realizing iterative schemes to optimize this objective incrementally.
Particularly, we show that the standard transformer block can be derived from
alternating optimization on complementary parts of this objective: the
multi-head self-attention operator can be viewed as a gradient descent step to
compress the token sets by minimizing their lossy coding rate, and the
subsequent multi-layer perceptron can be viewed as attempting to sparsify the
representation of the tokens. This leads to a family of white-box
transformer-like deep network architectures which are mathematically fully
interpretable. Despite their simplicity, experiments show that these networks
indeed learn to optimize the designed objective: they compress and sparsify
representations of large-scale real-world vision datasets such as ImageNet, and
achieve performance very close to thoroughly engineered transformers such as
ViT. Code is at \url{https://github.com/Ma-Lab-Berkeley/CRATE}.
