Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Measuring the Mixing of Contextual Information in the Transformer

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2203.04212 v3 pith:WOB66ORR submitted 2022-03-08 cs.CL

Measuring the Mixing of Contextual Information in the Transformer

classification cs.CL
keywords informationattentioninputinteractionslayerlayer-wisemodeltoken-to-token
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

The Transformer architecture aggregates input information through the self-attention mechanism, but there is no clear understanding of how this information is mixed across the entire model. Additionally, recent works have demonstrated that attention weights alone are not enough to describe the flow of information. In this paper, we consider the whole attention block -- multi-head attention, residual connection, and layer normalization -- and define a metric to measure token-to-token interactions within each layer. Then, we aggregate layer-wise interpretations to provide input attribution scores for model predictions. Experimentally, we show that our method, ALTI (Aggregation of Layer-wise Token-to-token Interactions), provides more faithful explanations and increased robustness than gradient-based methods.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. CachePrune: Privacy-Aware and Fine-Grained KV Cache Sharing for Efficient LLM Inference

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    CachePrune enables fine-grained, token-level KV cache reuse across LLM requests by masking sensitive segments, eliminating direct side-channel leakage while cutting TTFT by 4.5x and raising hit rates by 44% versus pri...

  2. Contribution Weights: A Geometrical Analysis of Self-Attention Transformers

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Contribution Weights combine attention, value magnitude, and directional alignment to measure token influence more faithfully than attention alone, and show attention sinks actively suppress information via a convex s...

  3. Geometry-Calibrated Conformal Abstention for Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Geometry-calibrated conformal abstention lets language models abstain from uncertain queries with finite-sample guarantees on both participation rate and conditional correctness of answers.

  4. Decoding the Multimodal Maze: A Systematic Review on the Adoption of Explainability in Multimodal Attention-based Models

    cs.LG 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A systematic literature review of explainability in multimodal attention models finds most studies focus on vision-language tasks with attention-based explanations, but evaluation methods lack consistency and modality...