arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

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 Computation and Language
Aug 28

Planting a Latent Variable in Natural-Looking Text: a More Realistic Test of Belief States in LLMs and Their Link to Concept Geometry

The paper introduces a method to embed a controllable latent variable into natural-looking text by steering a teacher LLM along eight sparse autoencoder directions that follow a ring-shaped Markov chain. A small transformer trained on this data successfully tracks the Bayesian posterior of the planted variable and arranges the eight states in the same ring order, linking belief states to concept geometry. This demonstrates that LLMs can model latent variables and that concept geometry may arise from the statistical dynamics of these variables.

By Alexandru-Iulius Jerpelea