Why Attention Fails: A Taxonomy of Faults in Attention-Based Neural Networks

Attention mechanisms are at the core of modern neural architectures, powering systems ranging from ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles, and driving a major economic impact. However, high-profile failures, such as ChatGPT’s nonsensical outputs or Google’s suspension of Gemini’s image generation due to attention weight errors, highlight a critical gap: existing deep learning fault taxonomies might not adequately capture the unique failures introduced by attention mechanisms. This gap leaves practitioners without actionable diagnostic guidance. To address this gap, we present the first comprehensive empirical study of faults in attention-based neural networks (ABNNs). Our work is based on a systematic analysis of 555 real-world faults collected from 96 projects across ten frameworks, including GitHub, Hugging Face, and Stack Overflow. Through our analysis, we develop a novel taxonomy comprising seven attention-specific fault categories, not captured by existing work. Our results show that over half of the ABNN faults arise from mechanisms unique to attention architectures. We further analyze the root causes and manifestations of these faults through various symptoms. Finally, by analyzing symptom–root cause associations, we identify four evidence-based diagnostic heuristics that explain 33.0% of attention-specific faults and provide systematic, taxonomy-driven guidance for diagnosing faults in ABNNs.