English
Related papers

Related papers: Finding Neurons in a Haystack: Case Studies with S…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Shun Wang , Tyler Loakman , Youbo Lei , Yi Liu , Bohao Yang , Yuting Zhao , Dong Yang , Chenghua Lin

In this work, we investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) adapt their internal representations when encountering inputs of increasing difficulty, quantified as the degree of out-of-distribution (OOD) shift. We reveal a consistent and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Mingyu Jin , Yutong Yin , Jingcheng Niu , Qingcheng Zeng , Wujiang Xu , Mengnan Du , Wei Cheng , Zhaoran Wang , Tianlong Chen , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Language-specific neurons in LLMs that strongly correlate with individual languages have been shown to influence model behavior by deactivating them. However, their role in amplification remains underexplored. This work investigates the…

Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive performance on various linguistic tasks, but their relationship to human language processing in the brain remains unclear. This paper examines the gaps and overlaps between LMs and the brain at…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-07-08 Tommaso Tosato , Pascal Jr Tikeng Notsawo , Saskia Helbling , Irina Rish , Guillaume Dumas

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across languages, yet how language capabilities are organized at the neuron level remains poorly understood. Prior work has identified language-related neurons mainly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Yifan Le , Yunliang Li

Can we use spiking neural networks (SNN) as generative models of multi-neuronal recordings, while taking into account that most neurons are unobserved? Modeling the unobserved neurons with large pools of hidden spiking neurons leads to…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-01-10 Shuqi Wang , Valentin Schmutz , Guillaume Bellec , Wulfram Gerstner

Activation sparsity is an intriguing property of deep neural networks that has been extensively studied in ReLU-based models, due to its advantages for efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. However, methods relying on exact zero…

Behavioral alignment in large language models (LLMs) is often achieved through broad fine-tuning, which can result in undesired side effects like distributional shift and low interpretability. We propose a method for alignment that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Claire O'Brien , Jessica Seto , Dristi Roy , Aditya Dwivedi , Sunishchal Dev , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien , Ashwinee Panda , Ryan Lagasse

Large Language Models (LLMs) are composed of neurons that exhibit various behaviors and roles, which become increasingly diversified as models scale. Recent studies have revealed that not all neurons are active across different datasets,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Haoyun Xu , Runzhe Zhan , Derek F. Wong , Lidia S. Chao

Transformer networks, particularly those achieving performance comparable to GPT models, are well known for their robust feature extraction abilities. However, the nature of these extracted features and their alignment with human-engineered…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tanya Chowdhury , Atharva Nijasure , James Allan

While a lot of analysis has been carried to demonstrate linguistic knowledge captured by the representations learned within deep NLP models, very little attention has been paid towards individual neurons.We carry outa neuron-level analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Nadir Durrani , Hassan Sajjad , Fahim Dalvi , Yonatan Belinkov

Recent success in training deep neural networks have prompted active investigation into the features learned on their intermediate layers. Such research is difficult because it requires making sense of non-linear computations performed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-01 Yixuan Li , Jason Yosinski , Jeff Clune , Hod Lipson , John Hopcroft

While a lot of work has been done in understanding representations learned within deep NLP models and what knowledge they capture, little attention has been paid towards individual neurons. We present a technique called as Linguistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Nadir Durrani , Fahim Dalvi , Hassan Sajjad

We present a study on how and where personas -- defined by distinct sets of human characteristics, values, and beliefs -- are encoded in the representation space of large language models (LLMs). Using a range of dimension reduction and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Celia Cintas , Miriam Rateike , Erik Miehling , Elizabeth Daly , Skyler Speakman

Sparse linear models are one of several core tools for interpretable machine learning, a field of emerging importance as predictive models permeate decision-making in many domains. Unfortunately, sparse linear models are far less flexible…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-03 Ryan Thompson , Amir Dezfouli , Robert Kohn

Several studies have explored the mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) in coding tasks, but most have focused on programming languages (PLs) in a monolingual setting. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between multiple PLs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Amir Hossein Kargaran , Yihong Liu , François Yvon , Hinrich Schütze

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance by capturing complex interactions between input features. To identify these interactions, most existing approaches require enumerating all possible combinations of features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Landon Butler , Abhineet Agarwal , Justin Singh Kang , Yigit Efe Erginbas , Bin Yu , Kannan Ramchandran

Large Language Models (LLMs) are unable to reliably reason about specific physical systems. Attempts to imbue LLMs with knowledge of the necessary physics concepts have shown great promise, but explainability and validation remain open…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Sean Memery , Kartic Subr

Ambiguity is pervasive in real-world questions, yet large language models (LLMs) often respond with confident answers rather than seeking clarification. In this work, we show that question ambiguity is linearly encoded in the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Zhuoxuan Zhang , Jinhao Duan , Edward Kim , Kaidi Xu

Recent advances in foundation models present new opportunities for interpretable visual recognition -- one can first query Large Language Models (LLMs) to obtain a set of attributes that describe each class, then apply vision-language…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-08 An Yan , Yu Wang , Yiwu Zhong , Chengyu Dong , Zexue He , Yujie Lu , William Wang , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley