arXiv Machine Learning

Locality Does Not Imply Reachability: Boundary Repair in Block-Sparse Causal Attention

arXiv:2606. 02680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse causal attention is usually described by sequence locality: nearby tokens should remain easy to access, while distant tokens may be dropped to reduce cost.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

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 Machine Learning
Jun 5

Pattern Selectivity is Not Task-Causal Structure: A Cross-Architecture Mechanistic Study of Composed-Task Circuits in 1B-Class Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.

By Yongzhong Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Predict, Reuse, and Repair: Accelerating Dynamic Sparse Attention for Long-Context LLM Decoding

arXiv:2606. 30389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic sparse attention (DSA) accelerates long-context LLM decoding by attending to only the top-K KV blocks relevant to each query, but it introduces a serialized selection-to-attention dependency that emerges as a new latency bottleneck.

By Tianyu Wang, Gourav Rattihalli, Aditya Dhakal, Junbo Li, Zhiwei Ren, Dejan Milojicic, Longfei Shangguan
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Context by Distinct Information: An Auditable Dirichlet-Process Working Memory for Long, Redundant Context Streams

arXiv:2607. 10441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context engineering decides what information a model carries forward, and current designs meter it in tokens: compressing the past into a bounded recurrent state, keeping a key-value entry for every token, or imposing a fixed budget through a window or eviction rule.

By Siddharth Pal, Viktoria Rojkova