The Structural Attention Tax: How Retrieval Format Hijacks In-Context Learning Independent of Content

arXiv:2606.11198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content -- distinct from its semantic relevance -- can independently distort the model's attention distribution. We identify and formalise a phenomenon we term the structural attention tax: knowledge graph (KG) triples, due to their relational delimiters and repeated slot patterns, capture 2-3x more attention per token than semantically equivalent natural-language text ($\hat{o}$(KG) $\approx$ 0.70 vs. $\hat{o}$(neutral) $\app

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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