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Neural network models have achieved high performance on a wide variety of complex tasks, but the algorithms that they implement are notoriously difficult to interpret. It is often necessary to hypothesize intermediate variables involved in…
It has been found that Transformer-based language models have the ability to perform basic quantitative reasoning. In this paper, we propose a method for studying how these models internally represent numerical data, and use our proposal to…
Mathematical reasoning in large language models (LMs) has garnered significant attention in recent work, but there is a limited understanding of how these models process and store information related to arithmetic tasks within their…
Transformer-based models generate hidden states that are difficult to interpret. In this work, we analyze hidden states and modify them at inference, with a focus on motion forecasting. We use linear probing to analyze whether interpretable…
A growing body of research has demonstrated that the behavior of large language models can be effectively controlled at inference time by directly modifying their internal states, either through vector additions to their activations or…
Transformer-based language models often achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks while remaining fragile on basic numerical understanding and arithmetic operations. A central limitation is that numbers are processed as…
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive competence in various tasks, but their internal mechanisms on mathematical problems are still under-explored. In this paper, we study a fundamental question: how language models encode…
The inner workings of neural networks can be better understood if we can fully decipher the information encoded in neural activations. In this paper, we argue that this information is embodied by the subset of inputs that give rise to…
Using more test-time computation during language model inference, such as generating more intermediate thoughts or sampling multiple candidate answers, has proven effective in significantly improving model performance. This paper takes an…
Can we teach natural language understanding models to track their beliefs through intermediate points in text? We propose a representation learning framework called breakpoint modeling that allows for learning of this type. Given any text…
Modular exponentiation is crucial to number theory and cryptography, yet remains largely unexplored from a mechanistic interpretability standpoint. We train a 4-layer encoder-decoder Transformer model to perform this operation and…
Transformer-based language models excel in NLP tasks, but fine-grained control remains challenging. This paper explores methods for manipulating transformer models through principled interventions at three levels: prompts, activations, and…
Even though Transformers are extensively used for Natural Language Processing tasks, especially for machine translation, they lack an explicit memory to store key concepts of processed texts. This paper explores the properties of the…
The success of deep neural nets heavily relies on their ability to encode complex relations between their input and their output. While this property serves to fit the training data well, it also obscures the mechanism that drives…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on complex reasoning tasks, yet little is known about their ability to internally evaluate problem difficulty, which is an essential capability for adaptive reasoning and efficient…
Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps…
Predicting a label correctly does not necessarily require representing the operation that produces it. Transformer representations are known to carry label-level information, but whether they encode semantic operations producing those…
Deep architectures such as Transformers are sometimes criticized for having uninterpretable "black-box" representations. We use causal intervention analysis to show that, in fact, some linguistic features are represented in a linear,…
Large language models (LLMs) often benefit from intermediate steps of reasoning to generate answers to complex problems. When these intermediate steps of reasoning are used to monitor the activity of the model, it is essential that this…
Semantic associations such as the link between "bird" and "flew" are foundational for language modeling as they enable models to go beyond memorization and instead generalize and generate coherent text. Understanding how these associations…