2026
Attention Sinks and Compression Valleys in LLMs are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Enrique Queipo-de-Llano, Alvaro Arroyo, Federico Barbero, Xiaowen Dong, Michael M. Bronstein, Yann LeCun +1
ICLR 2026poster
Attention sinks and compression valleys have attracted significant attention as two puzzling phenomena in large language models, but have been studied in isolation. In this work, we present a surprising connection between attention sinks and compression valleys, tracing both to the formation of mass…