The Life Cycle of a Massive Activation: Stochastic Birth, Weight-Decay-Driven Growth, and Competitive Consolidation

arXiv:2610.00423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Massive activations, residual-stream coordinates with magnitudes far larger than typical activations, are associated with attention sinks in transformers, but how their scale is regulated during training remains incompletely understood. Combining training-trajectory analyses and controlled interventions, we trace their emergence, growth, and consolidation. Sink-carrying channels vary across random seeds but stabilize early within each run. Over longer training, surrounding channels erode and the sink concentrates onto a few redundant carriers.

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