# When More Becomes Less: Position-Dependent Repetition Effects in Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04021/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11324/) (2023)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [What BERT is not: Lessons from a new suite of psycholinguistic diagnostics for language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13528/) (2019)
- [Learning to Break the Loop: Analyzing and Mitigating Repetitions for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02369/) (2022)
- [Transformers need glasses! Information over-squashing in language tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04267/) (2024)
- [Exploring BERT's Sensitivity to Lexical Cues using Tests from Semantic Priming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03010/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits. We show this assumption fails. Our two-probe design holds a repeated-target prefix fixed and varies only the readout position: the adjacent probe places the slot immediately after the repeated block; the displaced probe places it inside a fresh sentence frame. Adjacent repetition behaves as priming intuition predicts: P(target) climbs with N and plateaus. Displaced repetition produces an inverted-U: P(target) rises to an early peak and then declines as more copies are added. The displaced inverted-U shows a per-word drop with bootstrap CI excluding zero in all 13 open-access encoder and decoder models we test, and replicates across Spanish, Chinese, German, and French in 42 of 42 multilingual cells. A six-condition causal ablation isolates the effect to exact lexical repetition rather than length, generic redundancy, or semantic-neighbour exposure. A frame-pragmatics control rules out an artefact of the readout frame. Internally, per-target-token attention falls with N while the total budget assigned to the repeated block grows in causal LMs but not in the masked LM we probe. Probes that vary repetition count cannot treat the readout position as orthogonal to what they measure.