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Related papers: Token Homogenization under Positional Bias

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Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jonathan Lys , Vincent Gripon , Bastien Pasdeloup , Axel Marmoret , Lukas Mauch , Fabien Cardinaux , Ghouthi Boukli Hacene

Positional bias - where models overemphasize certain positions regardless of content - has been shown to negatively impact model performance across various tasks. While recent research has extensively examined positional bias in text…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Kebin Wu , Fatima Albreiki

Natural language exhibits patterns of hierarchically governed dependencies, in which relations between words are sensitive to syntactic structure rather than linear ordering. While re-current network models often fail to generalize in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Jackson Petty , Robert Frank

Viewing Transformers as interacting particle systems, we describe the geometry of learned representations when the weights are not time dependent. We show that particles, representing tokens, tend to cluster toward particular limiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Borjan Geshkovski , Cyril Letrouit , Yury Polyanskiy , Philippe Rigollet

Tokenization is the first - and often underappreciated - layer of computation in language models. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables transformer models to approximate recurrent computation by externalizing intermediate steps, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Jiaqi Wei , Yiwei Xu , Chenyu You

The organization of latent token representations plays a crucial role in determining the stability, generalization, and contextual consistency of language models, yet conventional approaches to embedding refinement often rely on parameter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Meiquan Dong , Haoran Liu , Yan Huang , Zixuan Feng , Jianhong Tang , Ruoxi Wang

The application of large language models (LLMs) to chemistry is frequently hampered by a "tokenization bottleneck", where tokenizers tuned on general-domain text tend to fragment chemical representations such as SMILES into semantically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Prathamesh Kalamkar , Ned Letcher , Meissane Chami , Sahger Lad , Shayan Mohanty , Prasanna Pendse

An essential design decision for multilingual Neural Text-To-Speech (NTTS) systems is how to represent input linguistic features within the model. Looking at the wide variety of approaches in the literature, two main paradigms emerge,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-07-05 Ariadna Sanchez , Alessio Falai , Ziyao Zhang , Orazio Angelini , Kayoko Yanagisawa

Transformers have demonstrated success in graph learning, particularly for node-level tasks. However, existing methods encounter an information bottleneck when generating graph-level representations. The prevalent single token paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Ruixiang Wang , Yuyang Hong , Shiming Xiang , Chunhong Pan

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

Subword tokenization requires balancing computational efficiency and vocabulary coverage, which often leads to suboptimal performance on languages and scripts not prioritized during training. We propose to augment pretrained language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Jonas F. Lotz , Hendra Setiawan , Stephan Peitz , Yova Kementchedjhieva

Convolutional networks are considered shift invariant, but it was demonstrated that their response may vary according to the exact location of the objects. In this paper we will demonstrate that most commonly investigated datasets have a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Gergely Szabo , Andras Horvath

Cross-lingual semantic textual similarity systems estimate the degree of the meaning similarity between two sentences, each in a different language. State-of-the-art algorithms usually employ machine translation and combine vast amount of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-12 Tomáš Brychcín

In this work, we measure the impact of affixal negation on modern English large language models (LLMs). In affixal negation, the negated meaning is expressed through a negative morpheme, which is potentially challenging for LLMs as their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Thinh Hung Truong , Yulia Otmakhova , Karin Verspoor , Trevor Cohn , Timothy Baldwin

We study two recurring phenomena in Transformer language models: massive activations, in which a small number of tokens exhibit extreme outliers in a few channels, and attention sinks, in which certain tokens attract disproportionate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Shangwen Sun , Alfredo Canziani , Yann LeCun , Jiachen Zhu

Despite their empirical success, the internal mechanism by which transformer models align tokens during language processing remains poorly understood. This paper provides a mechanistic and theoretical explanation of token alignment in LLMs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Hadi Daneshmand

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to dominant autoregressive approaches. Although they achieve competitive performance on several tasks, a substantial gap remains in open-ended text generation.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Mengyu Ye , Ryosuke Takahashi , Keito Kudo , Jun Suzuki

Large Language Models are increasingly used in conversational systems such as digital personal assistants, shaping how people interact with technology through language. While their responses often sound fluent and natural, they can also…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Heet Bodara , Md Masum Mushfiq , Isma Farah Siddiqui

Positional encodings enable Transformers to incorporate sequential information, yet their theoretical understanding remains limited to two properties: distance attenuation and translation invariance. Because natural language lacks purely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Zihan Gu , Ruoyu Chen , Han Zhang , Hua Zhang , Yue Hu

Attention-based models, such as Transformer, excel across various tasks but lack a comprehensive theoretical understanding, especially regarding token-wise sparsity and internal linear representations. To address this gap, we introduce the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-27 Pierre Marion , Raphaël Berthier , Gérard Biau , Claire Boyer