Related papers: Interpreting Key Mechanisms of Factual Recall in T…
How do transformer-based large language models (LLMs) store and retrieve knowledge? We focus on the most basic form of this task -- factual recall, where the model is tasked with explicitly surfacing stored facts in prompts of form `Fact:…
To answer one-to-many factual queries (e.g., listing cities of a country), a language model (LM) must simultaneously recall knowledge and avoid repeating previous answers. How are these two subtasks implemented and integrated internally?…
Transformer-based language models (LMs) are known to capture factual knowledge in their parameters. While previous work looked into where factual associations are stored, only little is known about how they are retrieved internally during…
Language Models (LMs) often must integrate facts they memorized in pretraining with new information that appears in a given context. These two sources can disagree, causing competition within the model, and it is unclear how an LM will…
Understanding how Transformer-based language models store and retrieve factual associations is critical for improving interpretability and enabling targeted model editing. Prior work, primarily on GPT-style models, has identified MLP…
Multilingual large language models (LLMs) often exhibit factual inconsistencies across languages, with significantly better performance in factual recall tasks in English than in other languages. The causes of these failures, however,…
In-context learning \ -- performing tasks based on examples given in the prompt \ -- is an important capability that has emerged in large language models and has received significant attention in both theory and practice. Existing…
Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Language models (LMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. We propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop…
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their…
Large language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to perform factual recall. Prior work has found that transformers trained on factual recall tasks can store information at a rate proportional to their parameter count. In our…
Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. Here we propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify…
In decoder-based LLMs, the representation of a given layer serves two purposes: as input to the next layer during the computation of the current token; and as input to the attention mechanism of future tokens. In this work, we show that the…
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…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) store and retrieve vast amounts of factual knowledge acquired during pre-training. Prior research has localized and identified mechanisms behind knowledge recall; however, it has only focused on English…
The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…
In recent years, several Speech Language Models (SLMs) that represent speech and written text jointly have been presented. The question then emerges about how model-internal mechanisms are similar and different when operating in the two…
Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…
Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…
We present a reproduction study of "Competition of Mechanisms: Tracing How Language Models Handle Facts and Counterfactuals" (Ortu et al., 2024), which investigates competition of mechanisms in language models between factual recall and…