Related papers: Toward a Theory of Generalizability in LLM Mechani…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque. Mechanistic interpretability (i.e., the systematic study of how neural networks…

The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks or predominantly rely on memorizing vast amounts of pretraining data. To explore this issue, we…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to exhibit social, demographic, and gender biases, often as a consequence of the data on which they are trained. In this work, we adopt a mechanistic interpretability approach to analyze how such…

Large language models have exhibited impressive performance across a broad range of downstream tasks in natural language processing. However, how a language model predicts the next token and generates content is not generally understandable…

Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging field probing the inner workings of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Their ability to process and generate viable text and code has made them ubiquitous in many fields, while their…

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…

Recent advancements in cognitive science and multi-round reasoning techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest that iterative thinking processes improve problem-solving performance in complex tasks. Inspired by this, approaches like…

Large language models (LLMs) have led to breakthroughs in language tasks, yet the internal mechanisms that enable their remarkable generalization and reasoning abilities remain opaque. This lack of transparency presents challenges such as…

Despite their outstanding performance, large language models (LLMs) suffer notorious flaws related to their preference for simple, surface-level textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. This proposal investigates a…

In this work we present successor heads: attention heads that increment tokens with a natural ordering, such as numbers, months, and days. For example, successor heads increment 'Monday' into 'Tuesday'. We explain the successor head…

Recent cognitive modeling studies have reported that larger language models (LMs) exhibit a poorer fit to human reading behavior (Oh and Schuler, 2023b; Shain et al., 2024; Kuribayashi et al., 2024), leading to claims of their cognitive…

Two major areas of interest in the era of Large Language Models regard questions of what do LLMs know, and if and how they may be able to reason (or rather, approximately reason). Since to date these lines of work progressed largely in…

Mechanistic interpretability identifies internal circuits responsible for model behaviors, yet translating these findings into human-understandable explanations remains an open problem. We present a pipeline that bridges circuit-level…

Most written natural languages are composed of sequences of words and sentences. Similar to humans, large language models (LLMs) exhibit flexibility in handling textual positions - a phenomenon we term position generalization. They can…

This review synthesizes the nascent but critical field of developmental interpretability for Large Language Models. We chart the field's evolution from static, post-hoc analysis of trained models to a dynamic investigation of the training…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce a textual chain of thought (CoT) in the process of solving a problem, which serves as a potentially powerful tool to understand the problem by surfacing a human-readable, natural-language explanation.…

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) seem to generalize somewhat across languages. We hypothesize this is a result of implicit vector space alignment. Evaluating such alignment, we see that larger models exhibit very high-quality…

Large language models (LLMs) are remarkably efficient across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and well beyond them. However, a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the LLMs' generalization capabilities remains elusive. In…

This paper demonstrates that progressive localization, the gradual increase of attention locality from early distributed layers to late localized layers, represents the optimal architecture for creating interpretable large language models…