Papers with causal attention mechanism
ULLME: A Unified Framework for Large Language Model Embeddings with Generation-Augmented Learning (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for large language model embeddings have limited support for only a limited range of architectures and fine-tuning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables bidirectional attention across various LLMs and supports a range of fine-tuning strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables bidirectional attention across various LLMs and supports a range of fine-tuning strategies. |
Token Prepending: A Training-Free Approach for Eliciting Better Sentence Embeddings from LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on prompt engineering to extract sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) but these models are mostly decoder-only and the earlier tokens in the sentence cannot attend to the latter, resulting in biased encoding of sentence information and cascading effects on the final decoded token. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play and training-free technique that prepends each layer’s decoded sentence embedding to the beginning of the sentence in the next layer’ s input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can significantly improve the performance of existing prompt-based sentence embedding methods across different LLMs while incurring negligible additional inference cost. |
Just Pass Twice: Efficient Token Classification with LLMs for Zero-Shot NER (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to name entity recognition use autoregressive decoding, hallucinated entities, and formatting errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows causal LLMs to perform discriminative token classification with full bidirectional context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous best method on zero-shot NER benchmarks by +7.9 F1 on average across CrossNER and MIT benchmarks. |
Hierarchical Token Prepending: Enhancing Information Flow in Decoder-based LLM Embeddings (2026.acl-long)
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Xueying Ding, Xingyue Huang, Mingxuan Ju, Liam Collins, Yozen Liu, Leman Akoglu, Neil Shah, Tong Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models produce powerful text embeddings, but their causal attention mechanism restricts the flow of information from later to earlier tokens, harming performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prepending a single summary token to reduce attention-level compression by partitioning the input into blocks and prepending blocks to subsequent blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent performance gains across 11 retrieval datasets and 30 general embedding benchmarks. |