Emergent Structure in the Marginal Attention Space of Language Models

Abstract

While representation similarity across independently trained language models is well-documented, how internal mechanics such as attention behave across models remains far less characterized. Inspired by this gap, we examine the structure of post-softmax attention weights by marginalizing over query positions, mapping them into a joint token-head"marginal attention space". Evaluating across 60+ diverse LLMs, we find that different properties emerge when reducing this space along its token and head axes. When reduced token-wise, marginal attention yields a text-intrinsic signal robustly conserved across models. To explain this property, we empirically connect marginal attention to the input-output Jacobian of the network, and prove theoretically that under a smoothness assumption, models with similar next-token distributions are guaranteed to have similar input-output Jacobian statistics. When reduced head-wise, it forms a model-private signature conserved across documents. Practically, this provides a natural way to estimate a per-head budget for key-value (KV) cache eviction, effectively decoupling model-specific budget allocation from text-intrinsic token scoring. On standard eviction benchmarks, a per-head budget precomputed offline on pretraining text, combined with a training-free token score, shows competitive performance with methods that recompute the budget on every document or train it per target. Code available at https://github.com/Flegyas/marginal-attention