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Related papers: Attention Sink in Transformers: A Survey on Utiliz…

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Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

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

In this paper, we share our reflections and insights on understanding Transformer architectures through the lens of associative memory--a classic psychological concept inspired by human cognition. We start with the basics of associative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shu Zhong , Mingyu Xu , Tenglong Ao , Guang Shi

Large language models frequently exhibit hallucinations: fluent and confident outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the input context. While recent hallucination detection methods have explored various features derived from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jakub Binkowski , Kamil Adamczewski , Tomasz Kajdanowicz

Transformer has significantly propelled the development of artificial intelligence, and certainly the development of agents as well. We categorize attention structures of Transformer into two types based on the source of the input…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yongjin Cui , Xiaohui Fan , Huajun Chen

The Transformer is a highly successful deep learning model that has revolutionised the world of artificial neural networks, first in natural language processing and later in computer vision. This model is based on the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Ughi , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Matteucci

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yihong Chen , Zhouchen Lin , Quanming Yao

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Zizheng Pan , Bohan Zhuang , Haoyu He , Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai

The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

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

Transformer-based language models display impressive reasoning-like behavior, yet remain brittle on tasks that require stable symbolic manipulation. This paper develops a unified perspective on these phenomena by interpreting self-attention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

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

Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

The field of natural language processing has reached breakthroughs with the advent of transformers. They have remained state-of-the-art since then, and there also has been much research in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Soniya Vijayakumar

Attention networks, a deep neural network architecture inspired by humans' attention mechanism, have seen significant success in image captioning, machine translation, and many other applications. Recently, they have been further evolved…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Cheonbok Park , Inyoup Na , Yongjang Jo , Sungbok Shin , Jaehyo Yoo , Bum Chul Kwon , Jian Zhao , Hyungjong Noh , Yeonsoo Lee , Jaegul Choo

Multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is a key component of Transformers, a widely popular architecture in both language and vision. Multiple heads intuitively enable different parallel processes over the same input. Yet, they also obscure the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Pooyan Rahmanzadehgervi , Hung Huy Nguyen , Rosanne Liu , Long Mai , Anh Totti Nguyen

Transformers are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolaos Mylonas , Ioannis Mollas , Grigorios Tsoumakas