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Attention is foundational to large language models (LLMs), enabling different heads to have diverse focus on relevant input tokens. However, learned behaviors like attention sinks, where the first token receives the most attention despite…
Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading…
Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However,…
Unlearning in large language models is becoming increasingly important due to regulatory compliance, copyright protection, and privacy concerns. However, a key challenge in LLM unlearning is unintended forgetting, where the removal of…
While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved…
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…
Large language models exhibit remarkable performance across diverse tasks through pre-training and fine-tuning paradigms. However, continual fine-tuning on sequential tasks induces catastrophic forgetting, where newly acquired knowledge…
When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive ability to utilise information within the context of their input sequences to appropriately respond to data unseen by the LLM during its training procedure. This ability is known as…
Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short…
The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work…
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…
Hybrid architectures combining state-space models with attention have achieved strong efficiency-quality tradeoffs, yet existing approaches either apply attention uniformly or learn static sparse patterns. This misses a key opportunity:…
Where someone looks is a nonverbal communication cue that children and adults readily use. How well can Vision-Language Models (VLMs) infer gaze targets? To construct evaluation stimuli, we captured 1,360 real-world photos of scenes in…
Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word)…
Convolutional Neural Networks experience catastrophic forgetting when optimized on a sequence of learning problems: as they meet the objective of the current training examples, their performance on previous tasks drops drastically. In this…
Adaptive control of Euler-Lagrange systems is challenging when friction is governed by a finite-horizon internal state that is not directly observable from joint measurements. In this setting, the measured closed-loop state is no longer…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning: after learning new tasks sequentially, they perform worse on earlier tasks. Existing methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by data replay,…
Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled…