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Large language models often reason beyond surface tokens, but the internal stage at which token-level information becomes abstract relational structure remains unclear. We investigate this question by analyzing how attention heads and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Junjie Zhang , Zhen Shen , Xisong Dong , Gang Xiong

Large language models (LLMs) not only exhibit human-like performance but also share computational principles with the brain's language processing mechanisms. While prior research has focused on mapping LLMs' internal representations to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Maryam Rahimi , Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh , Mohammad Reza Daliri

Do brains and language models converge toward the same internal representations of the world? Recent years have seen a rise in studies of neural activations and model alignment. In this work, we review 25 fMRI-based studies published…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-10-22 Ángela López-Cardona , Sebastián Idesis , Mireia Masias-Bruns , Sergi Abadal , Ioannis Arapakis

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yongyi Yang , Hidenori Tanaka , Wei Hu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in pervasive computing due to their versatility and strong performance. However, despite their ubiquitous use, the exact mechanisms underlying their outstanding performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Alhassan Abdelhalim , Janick Edinger , Sören Laue , Michaela Regneri

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their capacity to function effectively across a diverse range of languages has shown marked improvement. Preliminary studies observe that the hidden activations of LLMs often resemble…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Yuxin Chen , Yiran Zhao , Yang Zhang , An Zhang , Kenji Kawaguchi , Shafiq Joty , Junnan Li , Tat-Seng Chua , Michael Qizhe Shieh , Wenxuan Zhang

Understanding the latent space geometry of large language models (LLMs) is key to interpreting their behavior and improving alignment. Yet it remains unclear to what extent LLMs linearly organize representations related to semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Baturay Saglam , Paul Kassianik , Blaine Nelson , Sajana Weerawardhena , Yaron Singer , Amin Karbasi

Large Language Models have shown tremendous performance on a large variety of natural language processing tasks, ranging from text comprehension to common sense reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for this success remain opaque,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Gaël Gendron , Qiming Bao , Michael Witbrock , Gillian Dobbie

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit emergent behaviors suggestive of human-like reasoning. While recent work has identified structured conceptual representations within these models, it remains unclear whether they functionally rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ningyu Xu , Qi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang

In the present paper we use a range of modeling techniques to investigate whether an abstract phone could emerge from exposure to speech sounds. In effect, the study represents an attempt for operationalize a theoretical device of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Petar Milin , Benjamin V. Tucker , Dagmar Divjak

Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging field probing the inner workings of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Pierre Beckmann , Matthieu Queloz

A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Alex Warstadt , Yohei Oseki , Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

Large language models (LLMs) have been able to perform various forms of reasoning tasks in a wide range of scenarios, but are they truly engaging in task abstraction and rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? To answer this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Guanyu Chen , Peiyang Wang , Yizhou Jiang , Yuqian Liu , Chujie Zhao , Ying Fang , Tianren Zhang , Feng Chen

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Jannik Brinkmann , Chris Wendler , Christian Bartelt , Aaron Mueller

People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Ningyu Xu , Qi Zhang , Chao Du , Qiang Luo , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang , Menghan Zhang

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have enabled unified reasoning across images, audio, and video, but extending such capability to brain imaging remains largely unexplored. Bridging this gap is essential to link…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yuxiang Wei , Yanteng Zhang , Xi Xiao , Chengxuan Qian , Tianyang Wang , Vince D. Calhoun

The association between language and (non-linguistic) thinking ability in humans has long been debated, and recently, neuroscientific evidence of brain activity patterns has been considered. Such a scientific context naturally raises an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Riku Kisako , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Ryohei Sasano

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks. However, the mechanisms by which these models encode tasks of varying complexities remain poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Jingyuan Huang , Qingcheng Zeng , Zhenting Wang , Wenyue Hua , Haiyan Zhao , Kai Mei , Yanda Meng , Kaize Ding , Fan Yang , Mengnan Du , Yongfeng Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Zheng Wei Lim , Alham Fikri Aji , Trevor Cohn

Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yuchen Zhou , Emmy Liu , Graham Neubig , Michael J. Tarr , Leila Wehbe