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Chain of thought is a natural inference-time method for increasing the computational power of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but comes at the cost of sequential decoding. Are there more efficient alternatives to expand a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

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 ability of neural networks to represent more features than neurons makes interpreting them challenging. This phenomenon, known as superposition, has spurred efforts to find architectures that are more interpretable than standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Lee Sharkey

Convex analysis is a modern branch of mathematics with many applications. As Large Language Models (LLMs) start to automate research-level math and sciences, it is important for LLMs to demonstrate the ability to understand and reason with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yepeng Liu , Yu Huang , Yu-Xiang Wang , Yingbin Liang , Yuheng Bu

Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Joshua S. Schiffman

Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Qi Sun , Marc Pickett , Aakash Kumar Nain , Llion Jones

Transformer-based language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of complex reasoning tasks. Prior theoretical work exploring the expressive power of transformers has shown that they can efficiently perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Zixuan Wang , Eshaan Nichani , Alberto Bietti , Alex Damian , Daniel Hsu , Jason D. Lee , Denny Wu

Modular exponentiation is crucial to number theory and cryptography, yet remains largely unexplored from a mechanistic interpretability standpoint. We train a 4-layer encoder-decoder Transformer model to perform this operation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 David Demitri Africa , Sara M. Kapoor , Theo Simon Sorg , Challenger Mishra

Integral transforms are invaluable mathematical tools to map functions into spaces where they are easier to characterize. We introduce the hyperdimensional transform as a new kind of integral transform. It converts square-integrable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Pieter Dewulf , Michiel Stock , Bernard De Baets

Despite significant progress in transformer interpretability, an understanding of the computational mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge. Many approaches interpret a network's hidden representations but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 James R. Golden

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Asif Shahriar , Rifat Shahriyar , M Saifur Rahman

Transformers have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, but comprehending their internal mechanisms remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel geometric perspective that elucidates the inner…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Raul Molina

This article demonstrates that convolutional operation can be converted to matrix multiplication, which has the same calculation way with fully connected layer. The article is helpful for the beginners of the neural network to understand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Wei Ma , Jun Lu

Do transformers, when trained on sequential reasoning traces, build internal models of the underlying task? And if so, does the structure of those internal representations mirror the structure of the domain? We train an 8-layer transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Roman Kniazev , Nathanaël Fijalkow

Understanding where transformer language models encode psychologically meaningful aspects of meaning is essential for both theory and practice. We conduct a systematic layer-wise probing study of 58 psycholinguistic features across 10…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Taisiia Tikhomirova , Dirk U. Wulff

Transformer based models have shown remarkable capabilities in sequence learning across a wide range of tasks, often performing well on specific task by leveraging input-output examples. Despite their empirical success, a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Chenlu Ye , Chi Han , Tong Zhang

Deep learning models develop successive representations of their input in sequential layers, the last of which maps the final representation to the output. Here we investigate the informational content of these representations by observing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Benjamin L. Badger

Deep learning models such as the Transformer are often constructed by heuristics and experience. To provide a complementary foundation, in this work we study the following problem: Is it possible to find an energy function underlying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Yongyi Yang , Zengfeng Huang , David Wipf

Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Pranav Agarwal , Aamer Abdul Rahman , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Simon J. D. Prince , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Richard E. Turner