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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

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.…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zizhuo Fu , Wenxuan Zeng , Runsheng Wang , Meng Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Itay Yona , Ilia Shumailov , Jamie Hayes , Federico Barbero , Yossi Gandelsman

Transformers commonly exhibit an attention sink: disproportionately high attention to the first position. We study this behavior in GPT-2-style models with learned query biases and absolute positional embeddings. Combining structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yuval Ran-Milo , Hila Ofek , Shahar Mendel

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Stephen Zhang , Mustafa Khan , Vardan Papyan

Attention sinks are tokens, often the beginning-of-sequence (BOS) token, that receive disproportionately high attention despite limited semantic relevance. In this work, we identify a class of attention sinks, which we term secondary sinks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jeffrey T. H. Wong , Cheng Zhang , Louis Mahon , Wayne Luk , Anton Isopoussu , Yiren Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Siquan Li , Kaiqi Jiang , Jiacheng Sun , Tianyang Hu

Attention is a fundamental component behind the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs). However, our current understanding of the attention mechanism, especially regarding how attention distributions are established,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Zhongzhi Yu , Zheng Wang , Yonggan Fu , Huihong Shi , Khalid Shaikh , Yingyan Celine Lin

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Suho Yoo , Youngjoon Jang , Joon Son Chung

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucination and context forgetting. Prior studies suggest that attention drift is a primary cause of these problems, where LLMs' focus shifts towards newly generated tokens and away from the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xu Liu , Guikun Chen , Wenguan Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced auditory speech recognition (ASR), visual speech recognition (VSR), and audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). However, understanding of their internal dynamics under fine-tuning remains…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-28 Anand , Umberto Cappellazzo , Stavros Petridis , Maja Pantic

Transformers underpin modern large language models (LLMs) and are commonly assumed to be behaviorally unstructured at random initialization, with all meaningful preferences emerging only through large-scale training. We challenge this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Siquan Li , Yao Tong , Haonan Wang , Tianyang Hu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Tianyu Guo , Druv Pai , Yu Bai , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan , Song Mei

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jiho Choi , Jaemin Kim , Sanghwan Kim , Seunghoon Hong , Jin-Hwi Park

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to contain significant redundancy, yet a systematic explanation for why certain components, particularly in higher layers, are more redundant has remained elusive. In this work, we identify the BOS…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jaewon Sok , Jewon Yeom , Seonghyeon Park , Jeongjae Park , Taesup Kim

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they often struggle with long-text sequences due to the ``lost in the middle'' phenomenon. This issue has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zewen Qiang , Sendong Zhao , Haochun Wang , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

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

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Guangxuan Xiao , Yuandong Tian , Beidi Chen , Song Han , Mike Lewis

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has become a critical mechanism for removing undesired data, knowledge, or behaviors from pre-trained models while retaining their general utility. Yet, with the rise of open-weight LLMs, we ask: can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Bingqi Shang , Yiwei Chen , Yihua Zhang , Bingquan Shen , Sijia Liu
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