We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies: MAs consistently spike immediately before full attention layers, forming pre-attention spikes (PAS), and can persist through intervening linear attention layers, giving rise to inter-spike plateaus (ISP). As full attention becomes denser, successive PAS become increasingly connected through ISP, ultimately recovering the stable MA morphology of full attention LLMs.
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By William Merrill, Yanhong Li, Tyler Romero, Anej Svete, Caia Costello, Pradeep Dasigi, Dirk Groeneveld, David Heineman, Bailey Kuehl, Nathan Lambert, Chuan Li, Kyle Lo, Saumya Malik, DJ Matusz, Benjamin Minixhofer, Jacob Morrison, Luca Soldaini, Finbarr Timbers, Pete Walsh, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ashish Sabharwal
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By Aditya Singh
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By Seokhoon Jeong, Mijung Kim, Taehwan Kim
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By XinYang He, Wei Wang, Bing Zhao, Xuan Ren, WenBo Li, WeiXu Qiao, Hu Wei, Lin Qu
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By Kuzey Torlak, H\"useyin Arda Arslan, An{\i}l Dervi\c{s}o\u{g}lu, Beyza Nur Deniz, Onur Boyar
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By Suvadeep Hajra