English
Related papers

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

200 papers

Recent advances in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their quadratic computational complexity concerning sequence length remains a significant bottleneck…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yefeng Zheng , Yingying Zhang , Derong Xu , Xuetao Wei , Tong Xu , Xiangyu Zhao

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

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with auxiliary tokens has emerged as a promising strategy for enhancing model performance. In this work, we introduce a lightweight method termed latent tokens; these are dummy tokens that may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

Memorization in Large Language Models (LLMs) poses privacy and security risks, as models may unintentionally reproduce sensitive or copyrighted data. Existing analyses focus on average-case scenarios, often neglecting the highly skewed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Hao Li , Di Huang , Ziyu Wang , Amir M. Rahmani

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

The widespread public deployment of large language models (LLMs) in recent months has prompted a wave of new attention and engagement from advocates, policymakers, and scholars from many fields. This attention is a timely response to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Samuel R. Bowman

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet little is known about their training dynamics at the token level. Evaluation typically relies on aggregated training loss, measured at the batch level, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Andrea Pinto , Tomer Galanti , Randall Balestriero

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require long-context understanding, but models continue to struggle with such tasks. We hypothesize that conventional next-token prediction training could contribute to this, because each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Falko Helm , Nico Daheim , Iryna Gurevych

This paper examines how the sequencing of images and text within multi-modal prompts influences the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). We performed empirical evaluations using three commercial LLMs. Our results…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Grant Wardle , Teo Susnjak

Large language model (LLM) tokenizers act as structured compressors: by mapping text to discrete token sequences, they determine token count (and thus compute and context usage) and the statistical structure seen by downstream models.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Mete Erdogan , Abhiram Gorle , Shubham Chandak , Mert Pilanci , Tsachy Weissman

With the development of large language models (LLMs) like the GPT series, their widespread use across various application scenarios presents a myriad of challenges. This review initially explores the issue of domain specificity, where LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Xiaoliang Chen , Liangbin Li , Le Chang , Yunhe Huang , Yuxuan Zhao , Yuxiao Zhang , Dinuo Li

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual understanding. This impressive leap raises a compelling question: how can language models, initially trained solely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Jing Bi , Junjia Guo , Yunlong Tang , Lianggong Bruce Wen , Zhang Liu , Chenliang Xu

Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Zhong Guan , Likang Wu , Hongke Zhao , Ming He , Jianpin Fan

Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Yekun Chai , Yewei Fang , Qiwei Peng , Xuhong Li

In decoder-based LLMs, the representation of a given layer serves two purposes: as input to the next layer during the computation of the current token; and as input to the attention mechanism of future tokens. In this work, we show that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Amit Ben-Artzy , Roy Schwartz

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have been widely used for natural language processing, computer vision, and other deep learning tasks. We find that seq2seq models trained with early-stopping suffer from issues at the token level. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Guangsheng Bao , Zhiyang Teng , Yue Zhang

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities but often produce unnecessarily long explanations that reduce efficiency. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to improve reasoning, most methods focus on accuracy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hanbing Liu , Lang Cao , Yuanyi Ren , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

Language has long been conceived as an essential tool for human reasoning. The breakthrough of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked significant research interest in leveraging these models to tackle complex reasoning tasks. Researchers…