Attention Deficits in Language Models: Causal Explanations for Procedural Hallucinations

Abstract

Large language models can follow complex procedures yet fail at a seemingly trivial final step: reporting a value they themselves computed moments earlier. We study this phenomenon as \emph{procedural hallucination}: failure to execute a verifiable, prompt-grounded specification even when the correct value is present in context. In long-context binding tasks with a known single-token candidate set, we find that many errors are readout-stage routing failures. Specifically, failures decompose into Stage~2A (gating) errors, where the model does not enter answer mode, and Stage~2B (binding) errors, where it enters answer mode but selects the wrong candidate (often due to recency bias). In the hard regime, Stage~2B accounts for most errors across model families in our tasks (Table~1). On Stage~2B error trials, a linear probe on the final-layer residual stream recovers the correct value far above chance (e.g., 74\% vs.\ 2\% on Qwen2.5-3B; Table~2), indicating that the answer is encoded but not used. We formalize ``present but not used'' via available vs.\ used mutual information and pseudo-prior interventions, yielding output-computable diagnostics and information-budget certificates. Finally, an oracle checkpointing intervention that restates the true binding near the query can nearly eliminate Stage~2B failures at long distance (e.g., Qwen2.5-3B $0/400 \rightarrow 399/400$ at $k = 1024$; Table~8).