arXiv:2607. 22694v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention collapse in autoregressive language models -- manifested as repetitive token loops where the model becomes trapped in self-reinforcing attractors -- is a persistent pathology that existing decoding-time heuristics fail to address at its root cause.
Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes.
The study investigates how lexical perturbations—such as keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion—affect large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks. Four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models were evaluated, revealing that character-level perturbations significantly reduce accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has minimal impact. The authors attribute this asymmetry to Attention Diversion, where fragmented subword tokenization draws disproportionate attention in middle and final transformer layers; they demonstrate that both token content and attention allocation are coupled, making it difficult for inference-time repair strategies to fully recover performance.
arXiv:2606. 12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation.
The paper introduces ADU, a fine‑grained training framework that unlearns sensitive information from large language models by decoupling contextual attention pathways instead of erasing tokens. ADU exploits the distinction between local and global attention heads to identify and suppress attention paths that retrieve persistent sensitive anchors, while preserving local‑attention structure and overall language modeling performance. Evaluation on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks shows ADU achieves superior forget quality (0.93 on TOFU) and retains 92.9% of model utility compared to 81.9% for existing baselines, with fewer side effects in benign contexts.
arXiv:2608. 04021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits.
arXiv:2606. 02920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model unlearning updates a trained model to behave as if it had not seen selected training examples, while preserving utility and avoiding costly retraining.
arXiv:2605.15508v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge i...
arXiv:2608. 14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior.
arXiv:2606. 24998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition.
arXiv:2608. 09417v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep decoder-only Transformers often replace the original Post-Norm architecture with Pre-Norm variants because Post-Norm training is highly sensitive to warmup and learning rate under conventional initialization schemes.
arXiv:2505. 15548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive transformer language models frequently exhibit training instability when trained on long sequences, particularly under low-precision arithmetic.
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:...