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We observe an empirical phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) -- very few activations exhibit significantly larger values than others (e.g., 100,000 times larger). We call them massive activations. First, we demonstrate the widespread…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Mingjie Sun , Xinlei Chen , J. Zico Kolter , Zhuang Liu

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) incur high inference latency due to a large number of visual tokens provided to LLMs. To address this, training-free visual token pruning has emerged as a solution to reduce computational costs;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Kibum Kim , Jiwan Kim , Kyle Min , Yueqi Wang , Jinyoung Moon , Julian McAuley , Chanyoung Park

Large language models (LLMs) have recently attracted considerable interest for their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, such as chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches to enhance this ability rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Xinyi Wang , Lucas Caccia , Oleksiy Ostapenko , Xingdi Yuan , William Yang Wang , Alessandro Sordoni

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pengcheng Huang , Tianming Liu , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Tong Xiao , Zulong Chen , Maosong Sun

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Padding tokens are widely used in large language models (LLMs) to equalize sequence lengths during batched inference. While they should be fully masked, implementation errors can cause them to influence computation, and the extent of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Rom Himelstein , Amit LeVi , Yonatan Belinkov , Avi Mendelson

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Kairong Han , Wenshuo Zhao , Ziyu Zhao , JunJian Ye , Lujia Pan , Kun Kuang

Recently, there has been growing interest in collecting reasoning-intensive pretraining data to improve LLMs' complex reasoning ability. Prior approaches typically rely on supervised classifiers to identify such data, which requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Kai Hua , Steven Wu , Ge Zhang , Ke Shen

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xiaomin Li , Zhou Yu , Zhiwei Zhang , Xupeng Chen , Ziji Zhang , Yingying Zhuang , Narayanan Sadagopan , Anurag Beniwal

Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Dong-Jae Lee , Sunghyun Baek , Junmo Kim

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in contextual knowledge understanding. In this paper, we show that these concentrated massive values consistently emerge in specific regions of attention queries (Q) and keys (K)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Mingyu Jin , Kai Mei , Wujiang Xu , Mingjie Sun , Ruixiang Tang , Mengnan Du , Zirui Liu , Yongfeng Zhang

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) often degrades when crucial information is in the middle of a long context, a "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon that mirrors the primacy and recency effects in human memory. We propose that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Nikolaus Salvatore , Hao Wang , Qiong Zhang

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive generalization capabilities, yet their potential for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) remains underexplored, where the model needs to transfer source-domain information to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Shuai Yi , Yixiong Zou , Yuhua Li , Ruixuan Li

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

Human cognition is punctuated by abrupt, spontaneous shifts between topics-driven by emotional, contextual, or associative cues-a phenomenon known as spontaneous thought in neuroscience. In contrast, self-attention based models depend on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Mumin Jia , Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Prajwal Singhania , Siddharth Singh , Shwai He , Soheil Feizi , Abhinav Bhatele

Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned for use on downstream tasks, though this can degrade capabilities learned during previous training. This phenomenon, often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, has important potential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Megan Ung , Alicia Sun , Samuel J. Bell , Bhaktipriya Radharapu , Levent Sagun , Adina Williams

Despite their impressive capabilities, aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate outputs that lack diversity. What drives this consistency in the generation? We investigate this phenomenon through the lens of probability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Chenghao Yang , Sida Li , Ari Holtzman

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

This paper explores the system 1 thinking capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), the intuitive ability to respond efficiently with minimal token usage. While existing LRMs rely on long-chain reasoning and excel at complex tasks, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Wenyuan Zhang , Shuaiyi Nie , Xinghua Zhang , Zefeng Zhang , Tingwen Liu