Bayesian Repetition Penalty: A Principled Adjacent-Conditional Framework for Reversing Attention Collapse in Autoregressive Language Models
Attention collapse in autoregressive language models -- manifested as repetitive token loops where the model becomes trapped in self-reinforcing attractors -- is a persistent pathology that existing decoding-time heuristics fail to address at its root cause. We present a principled framework that penalises or compensates anomalous confidence arising from collapsed generation patterns, by comparing a token's observed frequency against its corpus prior through an adjacent-conditional probability construction. The resulting self-normalising penalty ratio $R=f(m,n,p)/f(np,n,p)$ requires no ad hoc standardisation and admits a closed-form logit offset with zero approximation error. The correcti...
| Authors | Wenjie Fan, Bin Ma, Dong Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 July 2026 |
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