When More Becomes Less: Position-Dependent Repetition Effects in Language Models
Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits. We show this assumption fails. Our two-probe design holds a repeated-target prefix fixed and varies only the readout position: the adjacent probe places the slot immediately after the repeated block; the displaced probe places it inside a fresh sentence frame. Adjacent repetition behaves as priming intuition predicts: $P(\text{target})$ climbs with $N$ and plateaus. Displaced repetition produces an inverted-U: $P(\text{target})$ rises to an early peak and then declines as more copies are added. The displaced ...
| Authors | Han-yu Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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