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The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is significantly sensitive to the contextual position of information in the input. To investigate the mechanism behind this positional bias, our extensive experiments reveal a consistent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Zihao Yi , Delong Zeng , Zhenqing Ling , Haohao Luo , Zhe Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Wanxia Cao , Ying Shen

Vision-language models (VLMs) typically encode substantially more visual tokens than text tokens, resulting in significant token redundancy. Pruning uninformative visual tokens is therefore crucial for improving computational efficiency,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Kai Zhao , Wubang Yuan , Yuchen Lin , Liting Ruan , Xiaofeng Lu , Deng-Ping Fan , Ming-Ming Cheng , Dan Zeng

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they often struggle with long-text sequences due to the ``lost in the middle'' phenomenon. This issue has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zewen Qiang , Sendong Zhao , Haochun Wang , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Key-Value (KV) cache quantization has become a widely adopted optimization technique for efficient large language models (LLMs) inference by reducing KV cache memory usage and mitigating memory-bound constraints. Recent studies have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Zunhai Su , Kehong Yuan

Large language models frequently exhibit hallucinations: fluent and confident outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the input context. While recent hallucination detection methods have explored various features derived from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jakub Binkowski , Kamil Adamczewski , Tomasz Kajdanowicz

Attention mechanisms are central to the success of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to capture intricate token dependencies and implicitly assign importance to each token. Recent studies have revealed the sink token, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Seungjun Shin , Jaehoon Oh , Dokwan Oh

Token embeddings play a crucial role in language modeling but, despite this practical relevance, their theoretical understanding remains limited. Our paper addresses the gap by characterizing the structure of embeddings obtained via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Diyuan Wu , Aleksandr Shevchenko , Samet Oymak , Marco Mondelli

Cross-attention patterns in neural machine translation (NMT) are widely used to study how multilingual models align linguistic structure. We report a systematic artifact in cross-attention analysis of NLLB-200 (600M): non-content tokens -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Hillary Mutisya , John Mugane

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have recently emerged as powerful architectures capable of understanding and reasoning over both visual and textual information. These models typically rely on two key components: a Vision Transformer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jiayun Luo , Wan-Cyuan Fan , Lyuyang Wang , Xiangteng He , Tanzila Rahman , Purang Abolmaesumi , Leonid Sigal

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, a core task in recommendation systems, estimates user click likelihood using historical behavioral data. Modeling user behavior sequences as text to leverage Language Models (LMs) for this task has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Zixuan Li , Binzong Geng , Jing Xiong , Yong He , Yuxuan Hu , Jian Chen , Dingwei Chen , Xiyu Chang , Liang Zhang , Linjian Mo , Chengming Li , Chuan Yuan , Zhenan Sun

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has become a critical mechanism for removing undesired data, knowledge, or behaviors from pre-trained models while retaining their general utility. Yet, with the rise of open-weight LLMs, we ask: can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Bingqi Shang , Yiwei Chen , Yihua Zhang , Bingquan Shen , Sijia Liu

Attention is foundational to large language models (LLMs), enabling different heads to have diverse focus on relevant input tokens. However, learned behaviors like attention sinks, where the first token receives the most attention despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Pedro Sandoval-Segura , Xijun Wang , Ashwinee Panda , Micah Goldblum , Ronen Basri , Tom Goldstein , David Jacobs

We explore the internal mechanisms of how bias emerges in large language models (LLMs) when provided with ambiguous comparative prompts: inputs that compare or enforce choosing between two or more entities without providing clear context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Rishabh Adiga , Besmira Nushi , Varun Chandrasekaran

Transformers commonly exhibit an attention sink: disproportionately high attention to the first position. We study this behavior in GPT-2-style models with learned query biases and absolute positional embeddings. Combining structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yuval Ran-Milo , Hila Ofek , Shahar Mendel

We investigate the functional role of emergent outliers in large language models, specifically attention sinks (a few tokens that consistently receive large attention logits) and residual sinks (a few fixed dimensions with persistently…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit two striking and ostensibly unrelated behaviours: in-context learning (ICL) and repetitive generation. In both, the model behaves as though it had summarised the context into a population-level statistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Haoren Xu , Guanhua Fang

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) incur high inference cost due to iterative denoising, motivating efficient pruning. Existing pruning heuristics largely inherited from autoregressive (AR) LLMs, typically preserve attention sink tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Aidar Myrzakhan , Tianyi Li , Bowei Guo , Shengkun Tang , Zhiqiang Shen

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jie Ren , Qipeng Guo , Hang Yan , Dongrui Liu , Quanshi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin