English
Related papers

Related papers: Systematic Outliers in Large Language Models

200 papers

We investigate the origins of massive activations in large language models (LLMs) and identify a specific layer named the \textbf{Massive Emergence Layer (ME Layer)}, that is consistently observed across model families, where massive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zeru Shi , Zhenting Wang , Fan Yang , Qifan Wang , Ruixiang Tang

The impact of outliers and anomalies on model estimation and data processing is of paramount importance, as evidenced by the extensive body of research spanning various fields over several decades: thousands of research papers have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Madalina Olteanu , Fabrice Rossi , Florian Yger

Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Sunnie S. Y. Kim , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan , Q. Vera Liao , Tania Lombrozo , Olga Russakovsky

Representations from large language models (LLMs) are known to be dominated by a small subset of dimensions with exceedingly high variance. Previous works have argued that although ablating these outlier dimensions in LLM representations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-24 William Rudman , Catherine Chen , Carsten Eickhoff

We study last-layer outlier dimensions, i.e. dimensions that display extreme activations for the majority of inputs. We show that outlier dimensions arise in many different modern language models, and trace their function back to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Iuri Macocco , Nora Graichen , Gemma Boleda , Marco Baroni

Active learning promises to alleviate the massive data needs of supervised machine learning: it has successfully improved sample efficiency by an order of magnitude on traditional tasks like topic classification and object recognition.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Siddharth Karamcheti , Ranjay Krishna , Li Fei-Fei , Christopher D. Manning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable success across various tasks. However, efficiently serving LLMs has been a challenge due to the large memory bottleneck, specifically in small batch inference settings (e.g.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Jung Hwan Heo , Jeonghoon Kim , Beomseok Kwon , Byeongwook Kim , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Rotating the activation and weight matrices to reduce the influence of outliers in large language models (LLMs) has recently attracted significant attention, particularly in the context of model quantization. Prior studies have shown that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Jingyang Xiang , Sai Qian Zhang

Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Jack Merullo , Carsten Eickhoff , Ellie Pavlick

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xinhao Yao , Hongjin Qian , Xiaolin Hu , Gengze Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Yong Liu

Large language models exhibit remarkable performance across diverse tasks through pre-training and fine-tuning paradigms. However, continual fine-tuning on sequential tasks induces catastrophic forgetting, where newly acquired knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov

Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their remarkable performance across diverse domains, present a challenge when it comes to practical deployment due to their colossal model size. In response to this challenge, efforts have been…

This study explores the impact of class outliers on the effectiveness of example-based explainability methods for black-box machine learning models. We reformulate existing explainability evaluation metrics, such as correctness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Ikhtiyor Nematov , Dimitris Sacharidis , Tomer Sagi , Katja Hose

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Jiaming Ji , Kaile Wang , Tianyi Qiu , Boyuan Chen , Jiayi Zhou , Changye Li , Hantao Lou , Juntao Dai , Yunhuai Liu , Yaodong Yang

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) demonstrate exceptional reasoning abilities, enabling strong generalization across diverse tasks such as commonsense reasoning and instruction following. However, as LLMs scale, inference costs become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker , Benedikt Staffler , Frank Hutter , Aaron Klein

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved various aspects of our daily lives. These models have impacted numerous domains, from healthcare to education, enhancing productivity, decision-making processes, and accessibility. As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zhao Song , Guangyi Xu , Junze Yin

We analyze how large language models (LLMs) represent out-of-context words, investigating their reliance on the given context to capture their semantics. Our likelihood-guided text perturbations reveal a correlation between token likelihood…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Valeria Ruscio , Valentino Maiorca , Fabrizio Silvestri

Detecting anomalies or out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is critical for maintaining the reliability and trustworthiness of machine learning systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness not only in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Ruiyao Xu , Kaize Ding

Quantization of large language models (LLMs) faces significant challenges, particularly due to the presence of outlier activations that impede efficient low-bit representation. Traditional approaches predominantly address Normal Outliers,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Haokun Lin , Haobo Xu , Yichen Wu , Jingzhi Cui , Yingtao Zhang , Linzhan Mou , Linqi Song , Zhenan Sun , Ying Wei