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Recently, adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks has attracted increasing interest. Previous Parameter-Efficient-Tuning (PET) methods regard the pre-trained model as an opaque Black Box model, relying purely on data-driven…
Large language models demonstrate the intriguing ability to perform unseen tasks via in-context learning. However, it remains unclear what mechanisms inside the model drive such task-level generalization. In this work, we approach this…
Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…
Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to…
We propose Unified-IO, a model that performs a large variety of AI tasks spanning classical computer vision tasks, including pose estimation, object detection, depth estimation and image generation, vision-and-language tasks such as region…
This research addresses a fundamental question in AI: whether large language models truly understand concepts or simply recognize patterns. The authors propose bidirectional reasoning,the ability to apply transformations in both directions…
In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…
In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…
Through considerable effort and intuition, several recent works have reverse-engineered nontrivial behaviors of transformer models. This paper systematizes the mechanistic interpretability process they followed. First, researchers choose a…
Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…
In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…
While transformer models exhibit strong capabilities on linguistic tasks, their complex architectures make them difficult to interpret. Recent work has aimed to reverse engineer transformer models into human-readable representations called…
The attention mechanism lies at the core of the transformer architecture, providing an interpretable model-internal signal that has motivated a growing interest in attention-based model explanations. Although attention weights do not…
Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…
We propose a five-stage methodology for causal feature analysis in transformer language models (probe design, feature extraction, causal validation, robustness testing, and deployment integration) and demonstrate it end-to-end on GPT-2…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple intermediate steps. Despite the empirical success, the…
Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…
We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…
Circuit discovery aims to explain how language models (LMs) implement a specific task by localizing and interpreting a circuit, a computational subgraph responsible for the LM's behavior. Existing circuit discovery methods are…