The paper presents a mean‑field analysis of attention in language models, defining an average attention kernel that propagates representations layer by layer. When conditioned on a whole corpus, the kernel predicts the average evolution of representation geometry; when conditioned on a single context, it predicts the expected geometry for that context. The difference between actual attention and the mean‑field prediction—called the mean‑field deviation—captures context‑specific computation, revealing how models diverge from average behavior during training and in few‑shot tasks.
By Micah Adler, John W. Byers, Mark Crovella
arXiv:2607. 10677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-attention is a ubiquitous primitive in modern sequence models, yet its operator-level geometry is only partially understood.
By Binbin Lin, Wei Chen, Yalun Li, Wenxiao Wang, Jieping Ye, Xiaofei He
The paper investigates attention sinks—tokens or positions that attract disproportionate attention—in text-to-image transformers, comparing bidirectional diffusion models and causal autoregressive models. It finds that both model types exhibit attention sinks, but with distinct patterns: autoregressive models focus on the first and global tokens, while diffusion models develop sinks near modality boundaries, within text regions, and at spatial corners. Perturbation experiments show that sink-related heads influence generation more than non-sink heads, and introducing register tokens can redistribute attention without harming performance.
By Binglei Li, Mengping Yang, Zhiyu Tan, Wenxu Qian, Junping Zhang, Hao Li
arXiv:2511. 21338v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation.
By Julianna Piskorz, Cristina Pinneri, Alvaro Correia, Motasem Alfarra, Risheek Garrepalli, Christos Louizos
arXiv:2608.30720v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Representational similarity is foundational to analyses of deep networks, yet distances between point-valued representations are not intrinsically tied...
By Kieran Murphy
arXiv:2608. 14712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Each row of a transformer's attention matrix is a probability distribution over tokens, and in trained models most of that probability lands on a single \emph{sink} token, usually the first.
By Marios Papamichalis, Regina Ruane
arXiv:2606. 12058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention is the key mechanism underlying in-context learning in transformers, and attention patterns have been observed empirically to emerge abruptly during training.
By Itay Lavie, Kirsten Fischer, Andrey Lekov, Frederic Van Maele, Zohar Ringel, Moritz Helias
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning.
arXiv:2605. 04893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When a language model processes a hallucinated response, its attention routing tends to fail in one of two shapes: over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal.
By Dominik Dahlem, Diego Maniloff, Mac Misiura
arXiv:2601. 11618v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Geometric Attention (GA) specifies an attention layer by four independent inputs: a finite carrier (what indices are addressable), an evidence-kernel rule (how masked proto-scores and a link induce nonnegative weights), a probe family (which observables are treated as admissible), and an anchor/update rule (which representative kernel is selected and how it is applied).
By Luis Rosario Freytes
arXiv:2508. 17821v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms.
By Timur Mudarisov, Mikhail Burtsev, Tatiana Petrova, Radu State
arXiv:2602. 18849v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a sensitivity analysis for transformer attention in a geometry aligned with tokenwise computation.
By Seyed Morteza Emadi