Related papers: When Attention Sink Emerges in Language Models: An…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often allocate disproportionate attention to specific tokens, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the attention sink. While such sinks are generally considered detrimental, prior studies have identified a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to attend heavily to the first token in the sequence -- creating a so-called attention sink. Many works have studied this phenomenon in detail, proposing various ways to either leverage or alleviate it.…
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous…
Large language models (LLMs) often concentrate their attention on a few specific tokens referred to as attention sinks. Common examples include the first token, a prompt-independent sink, and punctuation tokens, which are prompt-dependent.…
Attention sinks are tokens, often the beginning-of-sequence (BOS) token, that receive disproportionately high attention despite limited semantic relevance. In this work, we identify a class of attention sinks, which we term secondary sinks,…
Attention is a fundamental component behind the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs). However, our current understanding of the attention mechanism, especially regarding how attention distributions are established,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often assign disproportionate attention to the first token, a phenomenon known as the attention sink. Several recent approaches aim to address this issue, including Sink Attention in GPT-OSS and Gated Attention…
The goal of this paper is to strengthen the reasoning of Omnimodal Large Language Models (Omni-LLMs) at inference time, without additional training. These models jointly process video, audio, and text, and given the large number of tokens…
Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…
Attention sinks -- tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass -- are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in…
Large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucination and context forgetting. Prior studies suggest that attention drift is a primary cause of these problems, where LLMs' focus shifts towards newly generated tokens and away from the…
Attention sinks are defined as tokens that attract disproportionate attention. While these have been studied in single modality transformers, their cross-modal impact in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLM) remains largely unexplored: are…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced auditory speech recognition (ASR), visual speech recognition (VSR), and audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). However, understanding of their internal dynamics under fine-tuning remains…
Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a \textit{mechanistic…
Practitioners have consistently observed three puzzling phenomena in transformer-based large language models (LLMs): attention sinks, value-state drains, and residual-state peaks, collectively referred to as extreme-token phenomena. These…
Transformers often display an attention sink: probability mass concentrates on a fixed, content-agnostic position. Are sinks a byproduct of the optimization/training regime? Or are they sometimes functionally necessary in softmax…
Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However,…
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive approaches, enabling parallel text generation with competitive performance. Despite these advantages, there is a critical instability in DLMs: the…
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their impressive capabilities, often fail to accurately repeat a single word when prompted to, and instead output unrelated text. This unexplained failure mode represents a vulnerability, allowing even…
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their…