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:2510. 07884v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weak-to-strong generalization provides a promising paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) by training stronger models on samples from aligned weaker ones, without requiring human feedback or explicit reward modeling.
By Houcheng Jiang, Junfeng Fang, Jiaxin Wu, Tianyu Zhang, Chen Gao, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, Yang Deng
arXiv:2606. 07604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analyzing attention weights has become a standard approach for interpreting the information flow of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Harry Jake Cunningham, Nicola Muca Cirone
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
arXiv:2609.37879v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: How many tokens from its context does a language model actually use, and what determines that number? We study this question through self-attention....
By Timur Mudarisov, Mikhail Burtsev, Radu State
The paper investigates how hybrid attention mechanisms—combining full softmax attention with recurrent alternatives—affect multilingual language models, especially for long sequences and poorly tokenized languages. Interpretability analysis reveals that cross‑lingual representations form patterns linked to the ordering of recurrent and full‑attention layers, with a notable spike in alignment after the first full‑attention layer. Distillation experiments show that alternative layer orderings consistently outperform the standard arrangement, achieving up to 2.5× faster learning, suggesting that starting with a full‑attention layer may benefit multilingual models.
arXiv:2605. 26366v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies on hallucination detection have shown that hallucination-related signals are more strongly encoded in intermediate layers than in the final layer of large language models (LLMs).
By Xinpeng Wang, William X. Cao, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Zhe Zeng
The paper investigates where and how large language models encode signals that indicate answer correctness. By examining hidden states, token probabilities, residual-stream features, attention, and their combinations, the authors find that correctness signals are concentrated in the answer span and that different signal families complement each other. Fusing these signals improves robustness, especially under distribution shifts, and can be used to control retrieval in downstream tasks.
By Yuansen Liu, Yixuan Tang, Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
The paper introduces HeadEntropy, a training‑free method that predicts the correctness of large language model (LLM) answers by measuring how stable each attention head’s pattern is to further gradient updates. By linking the trace of the softmax Jacobian to 2‑Renyi entropy, the authors show that attention spread correlates with gradient stability, enabling accurate hallucination detection without reference annotations. Across five instruction‑tuned LLMs and five diverse datasets—including medicine, multi‑hop reasoning, and mathematics—HeadEntropy achieves a 0.736 AUROC, outperforming other training‑free baselines and matching hidden‑state probes while incurring less than 1% of inference cost.
By Sophie Ostmeier, Brian Axelrod, Maya Varma, Asad Aali, Yabin Zhang, Magdalini Paschali, Sanmi Koyejo, Curtis Langlotz, Akshay Chaudhari
arXiv:2607. 24017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The empirical success of attention mechanism in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often obscures its inherent, subtle flaws.
By Pengkun Jiao, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-gang Jiang
arXiv:2606.14782v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong vision-language reasoning but incur large KV caches and high decoding latency with lo...
By Tianhao Chen, Yuheng Wu, Kelu Yao, Xiaogang Xu, Xiaobin Hu, Dongman Lee
arXiv:2608. 06411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse vision-language tasks, but their efficiency is limited by the cost of processing numerous visual tokens.
By Yuyao Sun, Tao Deng, Shuang Li, Deqing Wang, Hao Geng, Minjun Yu