Attention Degradation, Function Token Anchoring, and the Limits of Attention-Based Intervention in Large Language Models
Mean cross-positional attention degradation is widely reported in transformer interpretability, yet whether it causally limits contextual retrieval remains untested. We present six coordinated experiments across GPT-2, LLaMA-3.2-1B/3B, OPT-1.3B, and distilgpt2. We first characterise short-term (5-100 token) attention degradation, finding a universal exponential-then-plateau pattern whose rate is inversely correlated with depth, with distinct layer-wise entropy signatures per architecture. Function token anchoring proves architecture-dependent: OPT-1.3B (absolute positional encoding) shows distance-dependent preposition specificity, GPT-2 shows uniform non-specific dependence, and LLaMA (R...
| Authors | Sagar Dangal, Manoj Shakya |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 July 2026 |
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