The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.
By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
arXiv:2604. 09670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals.
By Hua-Dong Xiong, Li Ji-An, Jiaqi Huang, Robert C. Wilson, Kwonjoon Lee, Xue-Xin Wei
Instruction tuning is often thought to give language models a universal ability to follow instructions, but this study shows otherwise. By probing nine tasks across three models, the authors find that general probes reveal selective, not uniform, deficits, cross‑task transfer is weak and skill‑similar, and causal ablation uncovers sparse, asymmetric dependencies. The results suggest instruction following is a coordinated use of diverse linguistic skills rather than a single shared mechanism.
By Elisabetta Rocchetti, Alfio Ferrara
The study investigates how post‑training of large autoregressive language models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) affects their internal computation. Across two 7B ARM‑MDM families and four diagnostic tasks, the authors find that MDMs retain much of the ARM’s high‑attribution pathways on prefix‑dominant tasks, but reorganize computation toward earlier layers on globally constrained tasks. Component‑level probes reveal that ARMs depend on sharply specialized components, whereas MDMs show weaker specialization and more diffuse output‑space alignment.
By Injin Kong, Hyoungjoon Lee, Yohan Jo
arXiv:2601. 04098v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer language models systematically prefer tokens at specific input positions regardless of semantic relevance---a phenomenon known as positional bias.
By Maryam Rahimi, Mahdi Nouri, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
The paper introduces a three-level evaluation framework—behavioral deployment, LM-head readout, and probe recoverability—to distinguish whether a language model fails a syntactic test by not encoding structure or by failing to use it. Using a trilingual control-dependency benchmark, the authors find that probe recoverability consistently exceeds LM-head readout, which in turn exceeds behavioral deployment across seven models and three languages, with the largest gap observed in Qwen3-0.6B Instruct. Layer-localized activation patching shows that instruction tuning shifts the decoded layer later, suggesting decoding favors surface shortcuts and that behavioral evaluation understates what models encode while probing alone overstates what they deploy.
By Zhenyan Lu, He Wang, Xiaohui Huang
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
By Qi Cao, Jian Lou, Meiting Liu, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2607. 23054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, compresses key-value pairs through a shared low-rank bottleneck (cKV), achieving 81% KV-cache reduction during inference.
By Dhruvil S, Fenil Sojitra, Ravirajsinh Chauhan
arXiv:2608.12149v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies:...
By Zunhai Su, Bohan Sun, Xialie Zhuang, Shuibai Zhang, He Xiao, Jing Xiong, Hengyuan Zhang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tiantian Zhang, Ngai Wong, Chuan-Wei Kuo
arXiv:2609.35599v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: When recalling lists of concepts (e.g., animals) during the semantic fluency task (SFT), both humans and large language models (LLMs) organise thei...
By Luke Leckie, Peter M. Todd, Jacob G. Foster
arXiv:2605. 28854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility in adapting to novel tasks from in-context examples without parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL).
By Hua-Dong Xiong, Li Ji-An, Robert C. Wilson, Kwonjoon Lee, Xue-Xin Wei