Which the Eye Fears: Writing with Read-Blindness Explains Massive Activations in Transformers
Massive activation features (MAs) in Transformers are extreme-value residual-stream features that persist across layers despite the model's ability to suppress them. Why do they survive? Our investigation using an operator-level mechanistic analysis of attention and feed-forward (FFN) blocks reveals that these blocks systematically ignore MA coordinates while reading, but not while writing; creating a read-write asymmetry that blocks corrective feedback while allowing continued accumulation. We find that both attention and feed-forward layers have this read-blindness, and contribute to the emergence and persistence of MAs. To validate prior work that hypothesized that FFN's amplification ...
| Authors | Swagatam Mukhopadhyay, Vishal Vivek Saley, Vraj Parikh et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.