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Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive performance on tasks involving reasoning, leading to a lively debate on whether these models possess reasoning capabilities similar to humans. However, despite these successes, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Philipp Mondorf , Barbara Plank

Neural language models (LMs) perform well on tasks that require sensitivity to syntactic structure. Drawing on the syntactic priming paradigm from psycholinguistics, we propose a novel technique to analyze the representations that enable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Grusha Prasad , Marten van Schijndel , Tal Linzen

This paper discusses the limitations of evaluating Masked Language Models (MLMs) in code completion tasks. We highlight that relying on accuracy-based measurements may lead to an overestimation of models' capabilities by neglecting the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Alejandro Velasco , David N. Palacio , Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas , Denys Poshyvanyk

Probing large language models (LLMs) has yielded valuable insights into their internal mechanisms by linking neural activations to interpretable semantics. However, the complex mechanisms that link neuron's functional co-activation with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yu Zheng , Yuan Yuan , Yue Zhuo , Yong Li , Gabriel Kreiman , Tomaso Poggio , Paolo Santi

Vision-language models (VLMs), serve as foundation models for multi-modal applications such as image captioning and text-to-image generation. Recent studies have highlighted limitations in VLM text encoders, particularly in areas like…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Sri Harsha Dumpala , David Arps , Sageev Oore , Laura Kallmeyer , Hassan Sajjad

Jailbreaks have been a central focus of research regarding the safety and reliability of large language models (LLMs), yet the mechanisms underlying these attacks remain poorly understood. While previous studies have predominantly relied on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Nathalie Kirch , Constantin Weisser , Severin Field , Helen Yannakoudakis , Stephen Casper

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias, struggling to utilize information from the middle or end of long contexts. Our study explores LLMs' long-context reasoning by probing their hidden representations. We find that while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Taiming Lu , Muhan Gao , Kuai Yu , Adam Byerly , Daniel Khashabi

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established standardized evaluation benchmarks as the primary instrument for model comparison. Yet, their reliability is increasingly questioned due to sensitivity to shallow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Bogdan Kostić , Conor Fallon , Julian Risch , Alexander Löser

Originally formalized with symbolic representations, syntactic trees may also be effectively represented in the activations of large language models (LLMs). Indeed, a 'Structural Probe' can find a subspace of neural activations, where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Pablo Diego-Simón , Stéphane D'Ascoli , Emmanuel Chemla , Yair Lakretz , Jean-Rémi King

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to achieve breakthrough performance on complex logical reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, most existing research focuses on employing formal language to guide LLMs to derive reliable reasoning paths,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Jin Jiang , Jianing Wang , Yuchen Yan , Yang Liu , Jianhua Zhu , Mengdi Zhang , Xunliang Cai , Liangcai Gao

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

Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Daria Kryvosheieva , Andrea de Varda , Evelina Fedorenko , Greta Tuckute

While state-of-the-art neural network models continue to achieve lower perplexity scores on language modeling benchmarks, it remains unknown whether optimizing for broad-coverage predictive performance leads to human-like syntactic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Jennifer Hu , Jon Gauthier , Peng Qian , Ethan Wilcox , Roger P. Levy

The recent trend towards utilisation of reasoning models has improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across many tasks which involve logical steps. One linguistic task that could benefit from this framing is idiomaticity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Dylan Phelps , Rodrigo Wilkens , Edward Gow-Smith , Thomas Pickard , Maggie Mi , Aline Villavicencio

Language models based on the Transformer architecture achieve excellent results in many language-related tasks, such as text classification or sentiment analysis. However, despite the architecture of these models being well-defined, little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Miguel López-Otal , Jorge Gracia , Jordi Bernad , Carlos Bobed , Lucía Pitarch-Ballesteros , Emma Anglés-Herrero

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to automate software engineering tasks, including the generation of UML class diagrams from natural language descriptions. While prior work demonstrates that LLMs can produce…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Rabia Iftikhar , Andreas Rausch

Recent work using auxiliary prediction task classifiers to investigate the properties of LSTM representations has begun to shed light on why pretrained representations, like ELMo (Peters et al., 2018) and CoVe (McCann et al., 2017), are so…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Kelly W. Zhang , Samuel R. Bowman

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong mathematical problem-solving abilities but frequently fail on problems that deviate syntactically from their training distribution. We identify a systematic failure mode, syntactic blind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Dane Williamson , Yangfeng Ji , Matthew Dwyer

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

Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Forrest Davis , Marten van Schijndel