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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…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning capabilities, but how they track and retrieve information from context remains underexplored. Drawing on the free recall paradigm in cognitive science (where participants…
Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…
Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads…
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…
This study investigates the reasoning robustness of large language models (LLMs) on mathematical problem-solving tasks under systematically introduced input perturbations. Using the GSM8K dataset as a controlled testbed, we evaluate how…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…
The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such…
Large language models (LLMs) encode parametric knowledge about world facts and have shown remarkable performance in knowledge-driven NLP tasks. However, their reliance on parametric knowledge may cause them to overlook contextual cues,…
Recently proposed evaluation benchmarks aim to characterize the effective context length and the forgetting tendencies of large language models (LLMs). However, these benchmarks often rely on simplistic 'needle in a haystack' retrieval or…
Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…
Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or…
Hallucinations -- plausible yet erroneous outputs -- remain a critical barrier to reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs). We present the first systematic study linking hallucination incidence to internal-state drift induced by…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in machine translation (MT) and demonstrated the ability to leverage in-context learning through few-shot examples. However, the mechanisms by which LLMs use different…
This study investigates the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) when faced with conflicting prompts versus their internal memory. This will not only help to understand LLMs' decision mechanism but also benefit real-world applications,…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to learn and perform complex tasks through in-context learning (ICL). However, a comprehensive understanding of its internal mechanisms is still lacking. This paper explores the…
Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), functioning as a whole to guide these models in generating reasoning steps toward final answers. However, we observe that…
In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…