Attention is Case-Sensitive
In human visual perception, uppercase lettering serves as a natural salience cue that captures attention within lowercase text. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical characterization study revealing that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit an analogous property: letter casing modulates internal attention allocation. Through analysis across 13 models, nine LLMs and four Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with diverse tokenization schemes, we show that formatting target information in alternating or uppercase against a lowercase context concentrates attention on those textual spans. In text this effect is universal, holding across every evaluated non-reasoning model. We frame it as ...
| Authors | Maximilian Dillitzer, Tin Stribor Sohn, Jason J. Corso et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
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