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Equation 28 · Part 2 · Cognitive Bias Was the Label; Attention Sink Is the Suspect

subscript

ϕsink\phi_{\mathrm{sink}}
subscript

What this part means

The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.

Its job in the formula

A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.

The passage around this formula

What changes if ϕsink\phi_{\mathrm{sink}} comes back high is not a correction to a footnote. It is a reclassification of what kind of problem serial position sensitivity is for anyone building an evaluation pipeline around LLM judgment: not a psychological quirk requiring behavioral workarounds borrowed from survey design, but an engineering property with an engineering fix — sink-aware attention variants, sink-token insertion at fixed positions, or architectures that never form the sink at all — sitting one training run away from the labs that already build these models. What changes if it comes back low is smaller but still real: it means the architectural account this article has spent its…

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →

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