arXiv:2607. 20524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mean cross-positional attention degradation is widely reported in transformer interpretability, yet whether it causally limits contextual retrieval remains untested.
By Sagar Dangal, Manoj Shakya
arXiv:2608. 20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often fail to answer questions about a bounded document collection when the source documents are not retrieved at inference time.
By Qian Kou, Xiaofeng Shi, Xiaosong Qiu, Hua Zhou
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:2608.21702v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds LLM generation on retrieved documents, but the standard terminal retrieval stage--dense-vector similarity,...
By Jing Liu, Yongxing Qi, Muchen Jiang, Chengnan Hu, Qingqing Peng, Haoming Wang, Yuqing Wang, Yang Yu, Xu Zhang, Ting Wu
arXiv:2602.22453v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Retrieval heads, a subset of attention heads in Transformers, were studied in English, showing its crucial role in retrieving information from the...
By Shaswat Patel, Vishvesh Trivedi, Yue Han, Yihuai Hong, Eunsol Choi
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. 03297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A standard claim in the literature on retrieval-augmented and memory-augmented language models is that shorter context is better when the relevant information is preserved.
By Mohsen Arjmandi
arXiv:2606. 00467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions.
By Etienne Casanova, Rafal Kocielnik, R. Michael Alvarez
arXiv:2607. 02980v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling modern large language models (LLMs) to long contexts is limited by the quadratic computation cost, and poor length extrapolation of dense attention.
By Xiang Hu, Xinyu Wei, Hao Gu, Minshen Zhang, Tian Liang, Huayang Li, Lei Zhu, Yan Wang, Sirui Han, Yushi Bai, Kewei Tu, Haitao Mi, Leo Liang
arXiv:2608. 11138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose that a model's uncertainty about a token is reflected not only in the breadth of its output distribution but also in whether a confident prediction is \emph{fragile} under perturbation of its attention pathways.
By Minsoo Kim, Sungyoung Ji, Kisung Moon, Ilyong Yoon
arXiv:2607. 21692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse attention reduces the cost of long contexts by allowing each query to read only selected parts of the input.
By Jim Allchin
In human visual perception, uppercase lettering serves as a natural salience cue that captures attention within lowercase text. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical characterization study revealing that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit an analogous property: letter casing modulates internal attention allocation.