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Transformer-based language models exhibit complex and distributed behavior, yet their internal computations remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods typically treat attention heads and multilayer perceptron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Areeb Ahmad , Abhinav Joshi , Ashutosh Modi

The Transformer architecture has become prominent in developing large causal language models. However, mechanisms to explain its capabilities are not well understood. Focused on the training process, here we establish a meta-learning view…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Xinbo Wu , Lav R. Varshney

Being able to interpret, or explain, the predictions made by a machine learning model is of fundamental importance. This is especially true when there is interest in deploying data-driven models to make high-stakes decisions, e.g. in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 An-phi Nguyen , María Rodríguez Martínez

Attention mechanisms have played a crucial role in the development of complex architectures such as Transformers in natural language processing. However, Transformers remain hard to interpret and are considered as black-boxes. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Milan Bhan , Nina Achache , Victor Legrand , Annabelle Blangero , Nicolas Chesneau

Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Anej Svete , Nadav Borenstein , Mike Zhou , Isabelle Augenstein , Ryan Cotterell

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Haiyan Zhao , Hanjie Chen , Fan Yang , Ninghao Liu , Huiqi Deng , Hengyi Cai , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Mengnan Du

In this paper, we introduce a novel interpreting framework that learns an interpretable model based on an ontology-based sampling technique to explain agnostic prediction models. Different from existing approaches, our algorithm considers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Phung Lai , NhatHai Phan , Han Hu , Anuja Badeti , David Newman , Dejing Dou

Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…

Materials Science · Physics 2025-10-10 Şener Özönder

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand how neural networks generalize beyond their training data by reverse-engineering their internal structures. We introduce patterning as the dual problem: given a desired form of generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 George Wang , Daniel Murfet

The importance of explainability in machine learning continues to grow, as both neural-network architectures and the data they model become increasingly complex. Unique challenges arise when a model's input features become high dimensional:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Damien de Mijolla , Christopher Frye , Markus Kunesch , John Mansir , Ilya Feige

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

Machine learning methods can be a valuable aid in the scientific process, but they need to face challenging settings where data come from inhomogeneous experimental conditions. Recent meta-learning methods have made significant progress in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Matthieu Blanke , Marc Lelarge

Multi-layer models with multiple attention heads per layer provide superior translation quality compared to simpler and shallower models, but determining what source context is most relevant to each target word is more challenging as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-01 Thomas Zenkel , Joern Wuebker , John DeNero

Automaton models are often seen as interpretable models. Interpretability itself is not well defined: it remains unclear what interpretability means without first explicitly specifying objectives or desired attributes. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-28 Christian Albert Hammerschmidt , Sicco Verwer , Qin Lin , Radu State

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Viktor Schlegel , Kamen V. Pavlov , Ian Pratt-Hartmann

Supervised machine learning models boast remarkable predictive capabilities. But can you trust your model? Will it work in deployment? What else can it tell you about the world? We want models to be not only good, but interpretable. And yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Zachary C. Lipton

Pretrained transformer-based Language Models (LMs) are well-known for their ability to achieve significant improvement on NLP tasks, but their black-box nature, which leads to a lack of interpretability, has been a major concern. My…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Ximing Wen

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

Transformers trained on huge text corpora exhibit a remarkable set of capabilities, e.g., performing basic arithmetic. Given the inherent compositional nature of language, one can expect the model to learn to compose these capabilities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Rahul Ramesh , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Mikail Khona , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka

With the ever-increasing complexity of neural language models, practitioners have turned to methods for understanding the predictions of these models. One of the most well-adopted approaches for model interpretability is feature-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Muhammad Bilal Zafar , Michele Donini , Dylan Slack , Cédric Archambeau , Sanjiv Das , Krishnaram Kenthapadi