arXiv Computation and Language

Late Attention Layers Alone Can Copy Entity Tokens, but Not Without Attending to Their Context

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

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 Computation and Language
Oct 12

Knowing When to Stop: Efficient Context Processing via Latent Sufficiency Signals

Large language models (LLMs) often process entire input contexts even when only a small portion is needed to answer a query. The authors introduce dynamic context cutoff, a technique that lets LLMs self‑terminate processing once they have gathered enough task‑relevant information. By analyzing model internals, they find that certain attention heads encode latent sufficiency signals that can be detected with lightweight classifiers, enabling efficient context handling. Experiments on six QA datasets with LLaMA, Qwen, and Mistral models (1B–70B) show a 3.4 % accuracy gain and a 1.33× reduction in token usage, outperforming other context‑efficiency methods at similar token reductions. The study also notes that larger models can intrinsically assess sufficiency through prompting, while smaller models need explicit probing.

By Roy Xie, Junlin Wang, Paul Rosu, Chunyuan Deng, Bolun Sun, Zihao Lin, Bhuwan Dhingra
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

To Copy or Not to Copy: Controlling Speculative Decoding via Intrinsic Model Signals

The paper introduces SwitchSD, an adaptive framework that controls speculative decoding by distinguishing genuine copy intent from accidental repetitions using lightweight probes on a model’s internal representations. SwitchSD dynamically switches between neural drafting and context-based copying, achieving up to 15% throughput gains over existing baselines such as EAGLE3. The approach turns copying from a noisy heuristic into a principled, model-aware decoding regime.

By Roy Eisenstadt, Ido Cohen, Edo Cohen-Karlik, Lior Wolf, Itamar Zimerman
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 23

Memory Attention

Language models typically construct attention values from contextual hidden states, even when some of their content may be reusable across contexts. We investigate whether token-indexed memory can rep...

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Do New Attention Mechanisms Actually Fix Attention Sinks at Million-Token Context?

The paper investigates whether recent attention‑mechanism improvements—specifically gated attention, Kimi K3, Kimi Delta Attention, and Attention Residuals—effectively eliminate the attention‑sink problem when scaling language models to a one‑million‑token context window. Using a new diagnostic suite called SinkProbe, the authors evaluate sink mass, massive activation, position‑resolved recall, and the recency gap across four small models that vary only in token mixing and depth. Their findings show that the training objective, rather than the architecture, drives the emergence of attention sinks; gating did not replicate its previously reported benefits at the larger scale, and sink mass, activations, and positional bias behaved independently.

By Sara Rizwan, Samaanah Abdus Salam