Spectral Filters, Dark Signals, and Attention Sinks

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1. Verfasser: Cancedda, Nicola
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Cancedda, Nicola
author_facet Cancedda, Nicola
contents Projecting intermediate representations onto the vocabulary is an increasingly popular interpretation tool for transformer-based LLMs, also known as the logit lens. We propose a quantitative extension to this approach and define spectral filters on intermediate representations based on partitioning the singular vectors of the vocabulary embedding and unembedding matrices into bands. We find that the signals exchanged in the tail end of the spectrum are responsible for attention sinking (Xiao et al. 2023), of which we provide an explanation. We find that the loss of pretrained models can be kept low despite suppressing sizable parts of the embedding spectrum in a layer-dependent way, as long as attention sinking is preserved. Finally, we discover that the representation of tokens that draw attention from many tokens have large projections on the tail end of the spectrum.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_09221
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spectral Filters, Dark Signals, and Attention Sinks
Cancedda, Nicola
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Projecting intermediate representations onto the vocabulary is an increasingly popular interpretation tool for transformer-based LLMs, also known as the logit lens. We propose a quantitative extension to this approach and define spectral filters on intermediate representations based on partitioning the singular vectors of the vocabulary embedding and unembedding matrices into bands. We find that the signals exchanged in the tail end of the spectrum are responsible for attention sinking (Xiao et al. 2023), of which we provide an explanation. We find that the loss of pretrained models can be kept low despite suppressing sizable parts of the embedding spectrum in a layer-dependent way, as long as attention sinking is preserved. Finally, we discover that the representation of tokens that draw attention from many tokens have large projections on the tail end of the spectrum.
title Spectral Filters, Dark Signals, and Attention Sinks
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09221