Related papers: Attention Sinks and Compression Valleys in LLMs ar…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to attend heavily to the first token in the sequence -- creating a so-called attention sink. Many works have studied this phenomenon in detail, proposing various ways to either leverage or alleviate it.…
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…
Attention sinks and massive activations are recurring and closely related phenomena in Transformer models. Existing explanations have largely focused on the forward pass, yet in pre-norm Transformers, large residual-stream norms play only…
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…
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…
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…
Key-Value (KV) cache quantization has become a widely adopted optimization technique for efficient large language models (LLMs) inference by reducing KV cache memory usage and mitigating memory-bound constraints. Recent studies have…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…
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.…
Motivated in part by their relevance for low-precision training and quantization, massive activations in large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a topic of interest. However, existing analyses are limited in scope, and…
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…
Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a \textit{mechanistic…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is hindered by the substantial memory and computational costs associated with generating lengthy tokens. In this paper, we…
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…
Attention sinks are defined as tokens that attract disproportionate attention. While these have been studied in single modality transformers, their cross-modal impact in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLM) remains largely unexplored: are…
Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…
Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in table understanding, their internal mechanisms remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on 16 LLMs, covering general LLMs, specialist tabular LLMs, and…
Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) process a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational costs and inefficiency. Instruction-related visual token compression demonstrates strong task relevance, which…