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Related papers: Why do LLMs attend to the first token?

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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), 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

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Stephen Zhang , Mustafa Khan , Vardan Papyan

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Tankred Saanum , Can Demircan , Samuel J. Gershman , Eric Schulz

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

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 (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

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising efficacy across various tasks, becoming powerful tools in numerous aspects of human life. However, Transformer-based LLMs suffer a performance degradation when modeling long-term contexts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Weiyao Luo , Suncong Zheng , Heming Xia , Weikang Wang , Yan Lei , Tianyu Liu , Shuang Chen , Zhifang Sui

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Tianyu Guo , Druv Pai , Yu Bai , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan , Song Mei

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

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

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

The emergence of discourse-like tokens such as "wait" and "therefore" in large language models (LLMs) has offered a unique window into their reasoning processes. However, systematic analyses of how such signals vary across training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jaehui Hwang , Dongyoon Han , Sangdoo Yun , Byeongho Heo

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Mansi Sakarvadia , Arham Khan , Aswathy Ajith , Daniel Grzenda , Nathaniel Hudson , André Bauer , Kyle Chard , Ian Foster

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

In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of "selection biases" in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on problems where models are tasked with choosing the optimal option from an ordered sequence. We delve into biases related to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Sheng-Lun Wei , Cheng-Kuang Wu , Hen-Hsen Huang , Hsin-Hsi Chen
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