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The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions),…
We investigate the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to structural interventions by deleting and swapping adjacent layers during inference. Surprisingly, models retain 72-95% of their original top-1 prediction accuracy without any…
Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly…
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…
While there is much recent interest in studying why Transformer-based large language models make predictions the way they do, the complex computations performed within each layer have made their behavior somewhat opaque. To mitigate this…
We study minimal attention-only transformers under all-token corruption and show they admit a two-stage empirical Bayes interpretation. A single attention step computes a kernel-weighted posterior mean with respect to the empirical…
Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…
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…
The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…
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…
Investigating deep learning language models has always been a significant research area due to the ``black box" nature of most advanced models. With the recent advancements in pre-trained language models based on transformers and their…
Transformer-based language models are trained on large datasets to predict the next token given an input sequence. Despite this simple training objective, they have led to revolutionary advances in natural language processing. Underlying…
Can we localize the weights and mechanisms used by a language model to memorize and recite entire paragraphs of its training data? In this paper, we show that while memorization is spread across multiple layers and model components,…
Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through…
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…
Subword tokenization introduces a computational layer in language models where many distinct token sequences decode to the same surface form and preserve meaning, yet induce different internal computations. Despite this non-uniqueness,…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they often struggle with long-text sequences due to the ``lost in the middle'' phenomenon. This issue has…
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…
Token representation strategies within large-scale neural architectures often rely on contextually refined embeddings, yet conventional approaches seldom encode structured relationships explicitly within token interactions. Self-attention…
Attention mechanism plays a dominant role in the sequence generation models and has been used to improve the performance of machine translation and abstractive text summarization. Different from neural machine translation, in the task of…