Papers by Wanxia Cao
Attention Basin: Why Contextual Position Matters in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are sensitive to the contextual position of information in input. |
| Approach: | They introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank) which estimates a model’s intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set and reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks show that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures. |