Garbage Attention in Large Language Models: BOS Sink Heads and Sink-aware Pruning
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2606. 19150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of Transformer-based models in natural language processing stems from architectural scaling, which leads to a large number of parameters and hinders deployment in resource-constrained environments.
arXiv:2507. 01900v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret large language models, but their reliability after pruning is unclear. This study shows that pruning’s effect on an SAE is governed by perturbation energy, a covariance-weighted norm, and that magnitude pruning distorts the representation space by ignoring activation geometry. Activation-aware pruning methods such as Wanda and SparseGPT better preserve SAE behavior, and the authors find that middle layers are especially vulnerable, leading them to propose a layer‑wise sparsity allocation that reduces perplexity for a given sparsity level.
arXiv:2606. 27449v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-head attention conventionally partitions the hidden dimension equally across all heads at every layer, enforcing an identical representational subspace dimension (dh = dmodel/h) throughout the models depth.
arXiv:2605. 18331v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced significant growth and development in recent years.
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.