Related papers: The Dual-Route Model of Induction

Despite excelling on multimodal benchmarks, vision-language models (VLMs) largely remain a black box. In this paper, we propose a novel interpretability framework to systematically analyze the internal mechanisms of VLMs, focusing on the…

The in-context learning capabilities of modern language models have motivated a deeper mathematical understanding of sequence models. A line of recent work has shown that linear attention models can emulate projected gradient descent…

Probing and enhancing large language models' reasoning capacity remains a crucial open question. Here we re-purpose the reverse dictionary task as a case study to probe LLMs' capacity for conceptual inference. We use in-context learning to…

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Language models (LMs) are sentence-completion engines trained on massive corpora. LMs have emerged as a significant breakthrough in natural-language processing, providing capabilities that go far beyond sentence completion including…

We propose a method to teach multiple large language models (LLM) to collaborate by interleaving their generations at the token level. We model the decision of which LLM generates the next token as a latent variable. By optimizing the…

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

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…

Reasoning encompasses two typical types: deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Despite extensive research into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), most studies have failed to rigorously differentiate between…

Large language models are able to exploit in-context learning to access external knowledge beyond their training data through retrieval-augmentation. While promising, its inner workings remain unclear. In this work, we shed light on the…

When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part…

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

The next-token prediction (NTP) objective has been foundational in the development of modern large language models (LLMs), driving advances in fluency and generalization. However, NTP operates at the \textit{token} level, treating…

Natural language is composed of words, but modern large language models (LLMs) process sub-words as input. A natural question raised by this discrepancy is whether LLMs encode words internally, and if so how. We present evidence that LLMs…

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical tasks, prone to "hallucinating" incorrect answers due to their reliance on statistical patterns. This limitation is further amplified in average Small LangSLMs with…

In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual information. Analogous to human episodic memory, where the retrieval of specific events is enabled by…

Understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing their theoretical foundations and real-world applications. While the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have been studied…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities, one of the most important being in-context learning (ICL). With ICL, LLMs can derive the underlying rule from a few demonstrations and provide answers that comply with the…