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Since the advent of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but remain as black-box systems. Understanding the reasoning bottlenecks of LLMs has become a critical challenge, as these limitations are deeply tied…

Soft attention in Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) is susceptible to incorporating irrelevant information from the context into its latent representations, which adversely affects next token generations. To help rectify these…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit position bias systematically underweighting information based on its location in the context but how this bias varies across languages and models remains unclear. We conduct a multilingual study across…

Training Transformers on algorithmic tasks frequently demonstrates an intriguing abrupt learning phenomenon: an extended performance plateau followed by a sudden, sharp improvement. This work investigates the underlying mechanisms for such…

This article introduces the concept of the algorithmic unconscious to designate the set of structural determinations that operate within large language models (LLMs) without being accessible either to the model's own reflexivity or to that…

Outliers have been widely observed in Large Language Models (LLMs), significantly impacting model performance and posing challenges for model compression. Understanding the functionality and formation mechanisms of these outliers is…

While induction is considered a key mechanism for in-context learning in LLMs, understanding its precise circuit decomposition beyond toy models remains elusive. Here, we study the emergence of induction behavior within LLMs by probing…

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, a core task in recommendation systems, estimates user click likelihood using historical behavioral data. Modeling user behavior sequences as text to leverage Language Models (LMs) for this task has…

Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable semantic understanding but often struggle with structural understanding when processing graph topologies in a serialized format. Existing solutions rely on training external graph-based adapters…

The self-attention mechanism has significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, facilitating the development of advanced language-learning machines. Although its utility is widely acknowledged, the precise mechanisms of…

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

The design and optimization of hardware have traditionally been resource-intensive, demanding considerable expertise and dependence on established design automation tools. This paper discusses the possibility of exploiting large language…

In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of "selection biases" in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on problems where models are tasked with choosing the optimal option from an ordered sequence. We delve into biases related to…

Small language models (SLMs) have been increasingly deployed in edge devices and other resource-constrained settings. However, these models make confident mispredictions and produce unstable output, making them risky for factual and…

"Induction heads" are attention heads that implement a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. In this work, we present preliminary and indirect evidence for a hypothesis that induction heads might…

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Continual learning (CL) aims to train models that can sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge. Although previous works observed that pre-training can benefit CL, it remains unclear whether a pre-trained…

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is a milestone in generative artificial intelligence, achieving significant success in text comprehension and generation tasks. Despite the tremendous success of LLMs in many downstream tasks,…

Underlying mechanisms of memorization in LLMs -- the verbatim reproduction of training data -- remain poorly understood. What exact part of the network decides to retrieve a token that we would consider as start of memorization sequence?…