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What is an attention sink, and how does StreamingLLM use it for endless generation?

Drop the oldest tokens to bound the KV cache and the model collapses. Keep just the first few tokens and it generates indefinitely. The signal is understanding why those first tokens act as an attention sink.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

Drop the oldest tokens to bound the KV cache and the model collapses. Keep just the first few tokens and it generates indefinitely. The signal is understanding why those first tokens act as an attention sink.

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