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

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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be blind, often underutilizing their visual inputs even on tasks that require visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that VLMs are selectively blind. They modulate the amount of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Wan-Cyuan Fan , Jiayun Luo , Declan Kutscher , Leonid Sigal , Ritwik Gupta

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

Thinking LLMs produce reasoning traces before answering. Prior activation steering work mainly targets on shaping these traces. It remains less understood how answer tokens actually read and integrate the reasoning to produce reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Haoyang Chen , Yi Liu , Jianzhi Shao , Tao Zhang , Chengfu Huo , Wei Hu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in contextual understanding. However, their ability to attend to truly critical information during long-context reasoning and generation still falls behind the pace.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yiju Guo , Wenkai Yang , Zexu Sun , Ning Ding , Zhiyuan Liu , Yankai Lin

We investigate the performance of large language models on repetitive deterministic prediction tasks and study how the sequence accuracy rate scales with output length. Each such task involves repeating the same operation n times. Examples…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Wanda Hou , Leon Zhou , Hong-Ye Hu , Yubei Chen , Yi-Zhuang You , Xiao-Liang Qi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to process information using a proficient internal language consistently, referred to as latent language, which may differ from the input or output languages. However, how the discrepancy between the…

Most vision-language models (VLMs) apply a large language model (LLM) as the decoder, where the response tokens are generated sequentially through autoregression. Therefore, the number of output tokens can be the bottleneck of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Sixun Dong , Juhua Hu , Steven Li , Wei Wen , Qi Qian

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now state-of-the-art at summarization, yet the internal notion of importance that drives their information selections remains hidden. We propose to investigate this by combining behavioral and computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yongxin Zhou , Changshun Wu , Philippe Mulhem , Didier Schwab , Maxime Peyrard

This work introduces an efficient method to scale Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to infinitely long inputs with bounded memory and computation. A key component in our proposed approach is a new attention technique dubbed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Tsendsuren Munkhdalai , Manaal Faruqui , Siddharth Gopal

LLMs are statistical models of language learning through stochastic gradient descent with a next token prediction objective. Prompting a popular view among AI modelers: LLMs are just next token predictors. While LLMs are engineered using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Stephen M. Downes , Patrick Forber , Alex Grzankowski

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to individual users requires incorporating extensive interaction histories and profiles, but input token constraints make this impractical due to high inference latency and API costs. Existing…

Backdoor attacks creating 'sleeper agents' in large language models (LLMs) pose significant safety risks. This study employs mechanistic interpretability to explore resulting internal structural differences. Comparing clean Qwen2.5-3B…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Mohammed Abu Baker , Lakshmi Babu-Saheer

Attention based Transformer architecture has enabled significant advances in the field of natural language processing. In addition to new pre-training techniques, recent improvements crucially rely on working with a relatively larger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Generative large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks, yet their inner workings remain underexplored beyond token-level predictions. This study investigates the degree to which these models decide the content of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Nicholas Pochinkov , Angelo Benoit , Lovkush Agarwal , Zainab Ali Majid , Lucile Ter-Minassian

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities including understanding context, engaging in logical reasoning, and generating responses. However, this is achieved at the expense of stringent computational and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Xindi Wang , Mahsa Salmani , Parsa Omidi , Xiangyu Ren , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Armaghan Eshaghi

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Leonardo Bertolazzi , Albert Gatt , Raffaella Bernardi

Even though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving various natural language tasks, the capability of an LLM to follow human instructions is still a concern. Recent works have shown great improvements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Xinbo Wu , Lav R. Varshney

The advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have decentralized the responsibility for the transparency of AI usage. Specifically, LLM users are now encouraged or required to disclose the use of LLM-generated content for varied types of…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Zhiping Zhang , Chenxinran Shen , Bingsheng Yao , Dakuo Wang , Tianshi Li

Large language models (LLMs) process and predict sequences containing text to answer questions, and address tasks including document summarization, providing recommendations, writing software and solving quantitative problems. We provide a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Ricardo Baptista , Andrew Stuart , Son Tran

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been widely used for code generation. Due to the complexity and opacity of LLMs, little is known about how these models generate code. We made the first attempt to bridge this knowledge gap by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Bonan Kou , Shengmai Chen , Zhijie Wang , Lei Ma , Tianyi Zhang