Paper Citation Record · LEDGER

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs

As of 6 August 2026, this Paper Citation Record lists 21 of 21 outbound references and 2 inbound Pith citation observations for arXiv:2603.06591.

A citation records a reference. It does not transfer a finding from one paper to another.

pith.paper-citation-record.v1
2603.06591 v2

Coverage vector

measured 21 of 21 reference resolution

Typed states for the displayed outbound observations.

Source: paper_references, paper_reference_links, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.979625Z

measured 23 of 23 standing notices

One-hop event checks from named stored sources.

Source: scholarly_work_events, retraction_status_cache, observed 2026-08-05T06:32:48.257954+00:00

measured 2 of 2 inbound itemization

Pith citing papers itemized under the disclosed page cap.

Source: paper_references, paper_reference_links, observed 2026-06-28T15:11:32.527978Z

measured 0 of 1 external citation measurements

A source-named dated measurement, never combined with another source.

Source: arxiv_reference, observed 2026-07-01T22:36:17.704896Z

Reference resolution

21 of 21 outbound references displayed

verified exact0
verified fuzzy0
unresolved20
parse uncertain0
malformed identifier1
metadata mismatch0

External citation measurements

No source-named external measurement is stored.

Outbound references

Observation fd7e7498-130d-4c9a-aea5-7ab74a0f6443 · outbound

This paper cites Layer Normalization.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Layer Normalization

Reference 1

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:44.732896Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation b9cfd999-ec27-4e31-9c98-ff992c29be22 · outbound

This paper cites Why do LLMs attend to the first token?.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Why do LLMs attend to the first token?

Reference 2

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:44.817870Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 762341ed-8f2a-427c-9098-19b871c537cc · outbound

This paper cites Theoretical Foundations of t-SNE for Visualizing High-Dimensional Clustered Data.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Theoretical Foundations of t-SNE for Visualizing High-Dimensional Clustered Data

Reference 3

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:44.875017Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 03a2aa62-12ee-46cb-994e-2bf7bc33c9d0 · outbound

This paper cites Spectral Filters, Dark Signals, and Attention Sinks.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Spectral Filters, Dark Signals, and Attention Sinks

Reference 4

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:44.927705Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 95f26965-95d3-4d02-8ee9-4782fd95b59f · outbound

This paper cites MagicPIG: LSH Sampling for Efficient LLM Generation.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs MagicPIG: LSH Sampling for Efficient LLM Generation

Reference 5

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:44.984092Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation a245cc30-7c9c-4ce0-af70-8c566836a620 · outbound

This paper cites The emergence of clusters in self-attention dynamics.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs The emergence of clusters in self-attention dynamics

Reference 6

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.055088Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation a6be503c-9e00-4604-a30a-8ceedd8e70c8 · outbound

This paper cites The Llama 3 Herd of Models.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs The Llama 3 Herd of Models

Reference 7

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.149007Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 519b3ead-c985-4fe2-8fbf-21b07849d65d · outbound

This paper cites When Attention Sink Emerges in Language Models: An Empirical View.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs When Attention Sink Emerges in Language Models: An Empirical View

Reference 8

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.217912Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 074b3f0a-b670-421c-9106-442ef0c1f6b4 · outbound

This paper cites Active-dormantattentionheads: Mechanistically demystifying extreme-token phenomena in LLMs, 2025.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Active-dormantattentionheads: Mechanistically demystifying extreme-token phenomena in LLMs, 2025

Reference 9

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.257668Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation c8c00357-2719-4c54-993d-619311cba654 · outbound

This paper cites LM-infinite: Zero-shot extreme length generalization for large language models.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs LM-infinite: Zero-shot extreme length generalization for large language models

Reference 10

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.302928Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 9d59e1c6-2595-4de4-b1c1-e47c593fb804 · outbound

This paper cites Fineweb-edu: the finest col- lection of educational content, 2024.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Fineweb-edu: the finest col- lection of educational content, 2024

Reference 11

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.356911Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 9fe0327a-bece-40e5-be7e-09642874b77e · outbound

This paper cites 2 OLMo 2 Furious.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs 2 OLMo 2 Furious

Reference 12

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.440129Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation c95e9c1b-181b-46d4-abed-afa0b43fd4eb · outbound

This paper cites WanJuan-CC: A Safe and High-Quality Open-sourced English Webtext Dataset.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs WanJuan-CC: A Safe and High-Quality Open-sourced English Webtext Dataset

Reference 13

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.517494Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation e07b8d76-666c-4405-9032-0873d054ea89 · outbound

This paper cites Qwen2.5 Technical Report.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Qwen2.5 Technical Report

Reference 14

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.576945Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 5183aab2-a868-4d0e-afb4-e351805dedd1 · outbound

This paper cites Identifying and evaluating inactive heads in pretrained llms, 2025.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Identifying and evaluating inactive heads in pretrained llms, 2025

Reference 15

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.634756Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation aa3e50ad-6be5-4ea3-9af8-c9ed592a114f · outbound

This paper cites Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks

Reference 16

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.689712Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 930dad20-5b3d-4135-91f5-413f543860ef · outbound

This paper cites Qwen3 Technical Report.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Qwen3 Technical Report

Reference 17

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.754739Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation ca10b16b-864f-4190-a90d-f7279d962d68 · outbound

This paper cites Unveiling and Harnessing Hidden Attention Sinks: Enhancing Large Language Models without Training through Attention Calibration.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Unveiling and Harnessing Hidden Attention Sinks: Enhancing Large Language Models without Training through Attention Calibration

Reference 18

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.793248Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 746e3b3d-c37e-4297-86c2-74741dffa449 · outbound

This paper cites Root Mean Square Layer Normalization.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Root Mean Square Layer Normalization

Reference 19

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.856712Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation 21b8f318-4d42-4153-bd9c-794726c953ee · outbound

This paper cites Attention sinks: A ’catch, tag, release’ mechanism for embeddings, 2025.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Attention sinks: A ’catch, tag, release’ mechanism for embeddings, 2025

Reference 20

Resolution: unresolved; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.926232Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Observation cac063aa-6701-4bb0-9b17-12be72649108 · outbound

This paper cites an unresolved cited work.

What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs Unresolved cited work

Reference 21

Resolution: malformed identifier; no resolver link, observed 2026-08-04T06:15:45.979625Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

Unavailable: canonical work link unavailable.

Pith citing papers

Observation f487e507-5162-4eee-9b2e-1a3d74c828fe · inbound

Irminsul: MLA-Native Position-Independent Caching for Agentic LLM Serving cites this paper.

Irminsul: MLA-Native Position-Independent Caching for Agentic LLM Serving What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs

Reference 26

Resolution: verified exact; arxiv_id, observed 2026-08-04T02:30:25.129019Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

No event found in the named queried sources as of 2026-08-05T06:32:48.257954+00:00.

Observation af4e6a35-f806-41cf-ac8c-3254e877880e · inbound

From Zero to Hero: Training-Free Custom Concept Spawning in World Models cites this paper.

From Zero to Hero: Training-Free Custom Concept Spawning in World Models What Makes Position Zero Special? A Mechanistic Study of Position Zero Attention Sinks in LLMs

Reference 24

Resolution: metadata mismatch; arxiv_id, observed 2026-08-04T02:30:25.129019Z

Source-reported events for the cited work

No event found in the named queried sources as of 2026-08-05T06:32:48.257954+00:00.