@inproceedings{rahman-qian-2026-attention,
    title = "Attention Under Attack: Analog Noise Effects and Mechanistic Vulnerabilities in Transformer Models",
    author = "Rahman, Mafizur  and
      Qian, Lijun",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-short.21/",
    pages = "227--237",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-391-3",
    abstract = "Analog in-memory computing (AIMC) offers substantial efficiency gains for transformer inference but introduces hardware-induced noise that can distort attention behavior. Prior studies primarily focus on AIMC evaluations for vision tasks and CNN-based models. They largely overlook how hardware-induced noise perturbs internal attention dynamics in NLP models. In this work, we present the first fine-grained analysis of analog vulnerability in pretrained transformers, examining projection submodules, attention heads, and layer-wise dynamics across multiple NLP tasks. Results show that query (Q), key (K), and value (V) projections are the most sensitive components, while feed-forward layers remain comparatively robust. Also, analog noise yields depth-dependent degradation in higher layers, leading to scattered attention and disrupted token routing. This pre-deployment analysis mitigates potential resource misuse before physical deployment and offers practical guidance for designing noise-resilient analog NLP transformers."
}