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Language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as attention sink. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Xiangming Gu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Qian Liu , Fengzhuo Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Ye Wang , Min Lin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Runyu Peng , Ruixiao Li , Mingshu Chen , Yunhua Zhou , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

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.…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Itay Yona , Ilia Shumailov , Jamie Hayes , Federico Barbero , Yossi Gandelsman

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Guangxuan Xiao , Yuandong Tian , Beidi Chen , Song Han , Mike Lewis

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jiho Choi , Jaemin Kim , Sanghwan Kim , Seunghoon Hong , Jin-Hwi Park

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jeffrey T. H. Wong , Cheng Zhang , Louis Mahon , Wayne Luk , Anton Isopoussu , Yiren Zhao

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xu Liu , Guikun Chen , Wenguan Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Siquan Li , Kaiqi Jiang , Jiacheng Sun , Tianyang Hu

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

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Suho Yoo , Youngjoon Jang , Joon Son Chung

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zihou Zhang , Zheyong Xie , Li Zhong , Haifeng Liu , Yao Hu , Shaosheng Cao

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fangzheng Wu , Brian Summa

Despite the widespread use of Transformer-based text embedding models in NLP tasks, surprising 'sticky tokens' can undermine the reliability of embeddings. These tokens, when repeatedly inserted into sentences, pull sentence similarity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Kexin Chen , Dongxia Wang , Yi Liu , Haonan Zhang , Wenhai Wang

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zizhuo Fu , Wenxuan Zeng , Runsheng Wang , Meng Li

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

Text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) have achieved excellent results in tasks such as information retrieval, semantic textual similarity, etc. In this work, we show an interesting finding: when feeding a text into the LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Zhijie Nie , Richong Zhang , Zhanyu Wu

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
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