Attention Degradation, Function Token Anchoring, and the Limits of Attention-Based Intervention in Large Language Models

Abstract

Mean cross-positional attention degradation is widely reported in transformer interpretability, yet whether it causally limits contextual retrieval remains untested. We present six coordinated experiments across GPT-2, LLaMA-3.2-1B/3B, OPT-1.3B, and distilgpt2. We first characterise short-term (5-100 token) attention degradation, finding a universal exponential-then-plateau pattern whose rate is inversely correlated with depth, with distinct layer-wise entropy signatures per architecture. Function token anchoring proves architecture-dependent: OPT-1.3B (absolute positional encoding) shows distance-dependent preposition specificity, GPT-2 shows uniform non-specific dependence, and LLaMA (RoPE) shows reversal at long distances. Strategic comma insertion at clause boundaries causally reduces prediction degradation in the 40-80 token range, with the benefit tied to syntactic boundary alignment rather than token density. We then test the mechanism causally: Relay-Aware Attention (RAA), which biases attention logits toward function token positions, verifiably increases attention mass by 16-24% yet yields null effects on GPT-2 and LLaMA-1B, preliminary harm on LLaMA-3B, and a mixed effect on OPT-1.3B that nets to approximately zero. Multi-fact retrieval probes further show that degradation rate does not predict retrieval accuracy across models. We conclude that mean attention degradation is largely descriptive rather than prescriptive: function tokens contribute through what their hidden states compute, not through the attention they receive -- with implications for interpretability methodology and attention-score-based inference optimisations such as KV-cache eviction.