Sink vs. diagonal patterns as mechanisms for attention switch and oversmoothing prevention
This paper studies the role of sinks and diagonal patterns as attention switch and anti-oversmoothing mechanisms. We analyze geometric conditions under which sinks can be represented, showing a necessary alignment between the embedding of the sink and all other embeddings. Next, we refine the current understanding of the role of sinks in oversmoothing prevention: we specify the conditions under which dense attention provably smooths more than sparse attention, and empirically verify that such conditions are often satisfied in practice. We further prove an equivalence between sinks and hard attention switch, in which the output of the attention is identically 0. Finally, we relax the hard ...
| Authors | Peter Súkeník, Cristina López Amado, Christoph H. Lampert et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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