Learn about the Social and Engineering Systems Doctoral Program by attending one of SES’s 2026 Admissions Q&A sessions. These are virtual question & answer sessions hosted by a member of the IDSS faculty as a follow-up to the pre-recorded SES Admissions Webinar. The SES Admissions Webinar (33 mins) should be viewed prior to attending the Q&A. Register!
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often concentrate their attention on a small set of tokens—referred to as attention sinks. Common examples include the first token, a prompt-independent sink, and punctuation tokens, which are prompt-dependent. Although these tokens often lack inherent semantic meaning, their presence is critical for model performance, particularly under model compression and KV-caching. Yet, the function, semantic role, and origin of attention sinks—especially those beyond the first token—remain poorly understood. In this talk, I’ll present a comprehensive investigation…
Abstract: Compute scaling has dominated the conversation with modern language models, leading to an impressive array of algorithms that optimize performance for a given training (and sometimes inference) compute budget. But as compute has grown cheaper and more abundant, data is starting to become a bottleneck, and our ability to exchange computing for data efficiency may be crucial to future model scaling. In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work on synthetic data and algorithmic approaches to…
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