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

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Why do large language models sometimes output factual inaccuracies and exhibit erroneous reasoning? The brittleness of these models, particularly when executing long chains of reasoning, currently seems to be an inevitable price to pay for…

Continual learning (CL) aims to train models that can sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge. Although previous works observed that pre-training can benefit CL, it remains unclear whether a pre-trained…

A practical large language model (LLM) service may involve a long system prompt, which specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents of the task and is reused across requests. However, the long system prompt causes…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, leveraging extensive pre-training and fine-tuning to achieve high accuracy. However, like humans, LLMs exhibit biases, particularly…

While fine-tuning LLMs on NLI corpora improves their inferential performance, the underlying mechanisms driving this improvement remain largely opaque. In this work, we conduct a series of experiments to investigate what LLMs actually learn…

Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…

Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning and intelligence. Despite…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibiting test-time scaling behavior, such as extended reasoning traces and self-verification, have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex, long-term reasoning tasks. However, the robustness of these…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in pervasive computing due to their versatility and strong performance. However, despite their ubiquitous use, the exact mechanisms underlying their outstanding performance…

While transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically support massive context windows, they suffer from severe performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. We attribute this failure to the attention…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to data-intensive workflows, from database querying to developer observability. Yet the effectiveness of these systems is constrained by the volume, verbosity, and noise of real-world…

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…

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Soft attention in Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) is susceptible to incorporating irrelevant information from the context into its latent representations, which adversely affects next token generations. To help rectify these…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on multi-turn reasoning datasets requires N (number of turns) separate forward passes per conversation due to reasoning token visibility constraints, as reasoning tokens for a turn are discarded in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity to store and recall facts. Through experimentation with open-source models, we observe that this ability to retrieve facts can be easily manipulated by changing contexts, even without altering…

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective solution for few-shot learning with large language models (LLMs). However, how LLMs leverage demonstrations to specify a task and learn a corresponding computational function through ICL…