Mamba 动力学中的首 token 吸引现象
First-Token Attraction in Mamba Dynamics
Trinh T. Nguyen, Minh-Khoi Nguyen-Nhat, Duy-Tung Pham, Hoang-Son Do, Tan Minh Nguyen, Thieu N. Vo
AI 速读 基于摘要
作者提出基于高维不变盒与尖锐退出时间的新分析框架,研究深度 Mamba 模型中首 token 的吸引作用及其导致的 token 聚类与 attention-sink 现象。
cs.AI
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We study token dynamics in deep Mamba models, with a particular focus on the attracting role of the first token. Unlike attention mechanisms, where token interactions are governed by positive scalar coefficients, Mamba dynamics involve full matrix-valued interaction coefficients with no positivity or definiteness guarantees. This structural difference makes Mamba dynamics substantially harder to analyze and prevents the direct application of existing techniques for attention-based models. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new analytical framework based on a high-dimensional invariant box and a sharp exit-time argument, which together recover an effective form of sign-definiteness. Using this framework, we characterize the possible limit points of token trajectories and prove explicit exponential convergence rates. Our analysis reveals that the first token has privileged dynamics: its limiting direction attracts subsequent tokens, inducing token clustering and attention-sink phenomena in deep Mamba models. We further show that this attraction mechanism extends to broader sequence dynamics, including state-space models, causal attention, and classical time-series models. Experiments on Falcon-Mamba-7B validate our predictions, showing that concentration on the first token increases with depth and dominates in later layers.