# Attention-likelihood relationship in transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08288/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02846/) (2021)
- [Linguistic Knowledge and Transferability of Contextual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08855/) (2019)
- [Revealing the Dark Secrets of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08593/) (2019)
- [Analyzing the Structure of Attention in a Transformer Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04284/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We analyze how large language models (LLMs) represent out-of-context words, investigating their reliance on the given context to capture their semantics. Our likelihood-guided text perturbations reveal a correlation between token likelihood and attention values in transformer-based language models. Extensive experiments reveal that unexpected tokens cause the model to attend less to the information coming from themselves to compute their representations, particularly at higher layers. These findings have valuable implications for assessing the robustness of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Fully reproducible codebase at https://github.com/Flegyas/AttentionLikelihood.