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Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities without being pre-trained on specially curated multilingual parallel corpora. It remains a challenging problem to explain the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Tianyi Tang , Wenyang Luo , Haoyang Huang , Dongdong Zhang , Xiaolei Wang , Xin Zhao , Furu Wei , Ji-Rong Wen

Recent advances in interpretability suggest we can project weights and hidden states of transformer-based language models (LMs) to their vocabulary, a transformation that makes them more human interpretable. In this paper, we investigate LM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Shahar Katz , Yonatan Belinkov

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Shuai Li , Zhao Song , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Tianyi Zhou

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

The state of the art in learning meaningful semantic representations of words is the Transformer model and its attention mechanisms. Simply put, the attention mechanisms learn to attend to specific parts of the input dispensing recurrence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Dongsheng Wang , Casper Hansen , Lucas Chaves Lima , Christian Hansen , Maria Maistro , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Christina Lioma

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yang Li , Zhichen Dong , Yuhan Sun , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Yijia Luo , Jiashun Liu , Han Lu , Jiamang Wang , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Junchi Yan

When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Junha Song , Byeongho Heo , Geonmo Gu , Jaegul Choo , Dongyoon Han , Sangdoo Yun

Understanding connections between artificial and biological intelligent systems can reveal fundamental principles of general intelligence. While many artificial intelligence models have a neuroscience counterpart, such connections are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Li Ji-An , Corey Y. Zhou , Marcus K. Benna , Marcelo G. Mattar

Generative large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks, yet their inner workings remain underexplored beyond token-level predictions. This study investigates the degree to which these models decide the content of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Nicholas Pochinkov , Angelo Benoit , Lovkush Agarwal , Zainab Ali Majid , Lucile Ter-Minassian

Achieving human-level performance on some of the Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) datasets is no longer challenging with the help of powerful Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, the internal mechanism of these artifacts remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yiming Cui , Wei-Nan Zhang , Wanxiang Che , Ting Liu , Zhigang Chen , Shijin Wang

Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Jack Merullo , Carsten Eickhoff , Ellie Pavlick

Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Prateek Verma , Mert Pilanci

Attention mechanisms have recently boosted performance on a range of NLP tasks. Because attention layers explicitly weight input components' representations, it is also often assumed that attention can be used to identify information that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Sofia Serrano , Noah A. Smith

Artificial Neural Networks, the building blocks of AI, were inspired by the human brain's network of neurons. Over the years, these networks have evolved to replicate the complex capabilities of the brain, allowing them to handle tasks such…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-11-11 Sanaz Saki Norouzi , Mohammad Masjedi , Pascal Hitzler

First derived from human intuition, later adapted to machine translation for automatic token alignment, attention mechanism, a simple method that can be used for encoding sequence data based on the importance score each element is assigned,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Dichao Hu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as dominant foundational models in modern NLP. However, the understanding of their prediction processes and internal mechanisms, such as feed-forward networks (FFN) and multi-head self-attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Xintong Wang , Xiaoyu Li , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Youxiang Zhu , Ruochen Li , Danqing Wang , Daniel Haehn , Xiaohui Liang

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) answer visual questions by transferring information from images to text through a series of attention heads. While this image-to-text information flow is central to visual question answering, its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jinyeong Kim , Seil Kang , Jiwoo Park , Junhyeok Kim , Seong Jae Hwang

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Lorenzo Basile , Valentino Maiorca , Diego Doimo , Francesco Locatello , Alberto Cazzaniga

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kayo Yin , Jacob Steinhardt