Massive Activations Are Architecturally Robust: A Controlled Scratch/Commitment Residual Stream Test
Trained transformers reliably develop massive activations, a small number of hidden dimensions whose magnitude is far above the median and which concentrate on the sequence-start token. Whether these outliers are a removable artifact of the residual stream's overloaded read and write role, or instead a functional necessity, is actively debated. We test the artifact hypothesis directly, with an architectural intervention. Our architecture, Ledger Residuals, splits the residual stream into a mutable scratch stream (Deliberation) that intermediate computation may freely overwrite and a protected, decode-only accumulator (Commitment) that holds the representation the model reads out. If massi...
| Authors | Maruthi Vemula |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 17 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 June 2026 |
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