The Structural Origin of Attention Sink: Variance Discrepancy, Super Neurons, and Dimension Disparity

arXiv:2605.06611v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a textitmechanistic explanation for this phenomenon. First, we trace its root to the value aggregation process inherent in self-attention, which induces a systematic variance discrepancy. We further demonstrate that this discrepancy is drastically amplified by the activation of super neurons within Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers. Specifically, the channel-sparse down-projections trigger a dimension disparity of the first-token representation, necessitating the formation of attention sinks as a structural anchor. Then, we validate this causal chain through two controlled interventions: (i) isolating the aggregation effect via attention mask modifications and (ii) amplifying the variance of targeted token representations. Both interventions can replicate attention sinks at arbitrary positions. Our mechanistic understanding offers a foundation for the systematic control of sink formation. Finally, as a proof of concept, we propose textithead-wise RMSNorm, an architectural modification that stabilizes value aggregation outputs during pre-training. Our experiments demonstrate that restoring statistical parity across positions significantly accelerates convergence.