---
title: "Causal attention mask mathematical notation"
description: "Causal attention mask is a recurring research-paper notation family. Prevents a token position from attending to future positions so autoregressive…"
canonical_url: "https://fanout.sh/labs/math-decoder/symbol/causal-mask"
md_url: "https://fanout.sh/labs/math-decoder/symbol/causal-mask.md"
last_updated: "2026-08-09"
access: "public"
---

# Causal attention mask mathematical notation

Causal attention mask is a recurring research-paper notation family. Prevents a token position from attending to future positions so autoregressive…

## Public overview

Causal attention mask is a recurring research-paper notation family. Prevents a token position from attending to future positions so autoregressive predictions cannot use unavailable information.

Causal attention mask: Prevents a token position from attending to future positions so autoregressive predictions cannot use unavailable information. Example: Future-token scores vanish after softmax.

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