Pith Number

pith:CMH4WK7D

pith:2026:CMH4WK7DQDNDZU666KI5JQFPNK

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SLASH the Sink: Sharpening Structural Attention Inside LLMs

Bin Lu, Chenghu Zhou, Meng Jin, Xinbing Wang, Yiming Liu

LLMs internally rebuild graph topologies in attention maps, but attention sinks dilute the signal which a simple redistribution can sharpen for better graph performance.

arxiv:2605.10503 v3 · 2026-05-11 · cs.AI

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Claims

C1strongest claim

LLMs spontaneously reconstruct the graph's topology internally, evidenced by a distinct 'sawtooth' pattern in their attention maps that structurally aligns with the 'token-level adjacency matrix'. This intrinsic structural understanding is diluted by the attention sink, formalized as a representation bottleneck from conflict between anisotropic bias and topology-aware local aggregation.

C2weakest assumption

That the observed sawtooth pattern is caused by genuine internal topology reconstruction rather than an artifact of tokenization or attention mechanics, and that redistributing attention to amplify it will not degrade performance on non-graph language tasks.

C3one line summary

SLASH redistributes attention in LLMs to amplify their spontaneous internal reconstruction of graph topologies, yielding gains on graph and molecular tasks.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:05:46.915258Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

130fcb2be380da3cd3def291d4c0af6ab54a4b29b1e68b2d8a3f92b15e4f2bd8

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.10503 · arxiv_version: 2605.10503v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.10503 · pith_short_12: CMH4WK7DQDND · pith_short_16: CMH4WK7DQDNDZU66 · pith_short_8: CMH4WK7D

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/CMH4WK7DQDNDZU666KI5JQFPNK \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 130fcb2be380da3cd3def291d4c0af6ab54a4b29b1e68b2d8a3f92b15e4f2bd8

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "a09930773b73552da0c5a470c6cac5a3f8ed2c571ab2abe06fea8c8b53bd8a2b",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-11T12:59:07Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "072f23611c86d5450add866cde9a5085f2f6bd5dccc7c2851b6b91d416beb1ec"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.10503",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
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}