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Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…
Understanding the latent space geometry of large language models (LLMs) is key to interpreting their behavior and improving alignment. Yet it remains unclear to what extent LLMs linearly organize representations related to semantic…
Overparameterized transformer networks have obtained state of the art results in various natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, language modeling, and question answering. These models contain hundreds of millions of…
Large language model (LLM) architectures are often described as functionally hierarchical: Early layers process syntax, middle layers begin to parse semantics, and late layers integrate information. The present work revisits these ideas.…
Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast datasets, encode extensive real-world knowledge within their parameters, yet their black-box nature obscures the mechanisms and extent of this encoding. Surrogate modeling, which uses simplified…
A major problem in the study of large language models is to understand their inherent low-dimensional structure. We introduce an approach to study the low-dimensional structure of language models at a model-agnostic level: as sequential…
As Large Language Models are deployed within Artificial Intelligence systems, that are increasingly integrated with human society, it becomes more important than ever to study their internal structures. Higher level abilities of LLMs such…
Large language models are increasingly used as computational tools for modeling human-like behavior. We introduce a behavioral induction framework that modifies model policies through fine-tuning on structured decision-making tasks: using…
Transformer-based language models create hidden representations of their inputs at every layer, but only use final-layer representations for prediction. This obscures the internal decision-making process of the model and the utility of its…
We investigate multi-scale transformer language models that learn representations of text at multiple scales, and present three different architectures that have an inductive bias to handle the hierarchical nature of language. Experiments…
Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…
Black-box probing models can reliably extract linguistic features like tense, number, and syntactic role from pretrained word representations. However, the manner in which these features are encoded in representations remains poorly…
Transformer-based language models are effective but complex, and understanding their inner workings and reasoning mechanisms is a significant challenge. Previous research has primarily explored how these models handle simple tasks like name…
The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…
Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities despite limited exposure to non-English data. Prior studies show that English-centric large language models map multilingual content into English-aligned representations at…
Language model representations often contain linear directions that correspond to high-level concepts. Here, we study the dynamics of these representations: how representations evolve along these dimensions within the context of (simulated)…
While vector-based language representations from pretrained language models have set a new standard for many NLP tasks, there is not yet a complete accounting of their inner workings. In particular, it is not entirely clear what aspects of…
The development of a reliable and robust surrogate model is often constrained by the dimensionality of the problem. For a system with high-dimensional inputs/outputs (I/O), conventional approaches usually use a low-dimensional manifold to…
While large models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest, such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic problems, are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs).…
Solving optimization problems with unknown parameters often requires learning a predictive model to predict the values of the unknown parameters and then solving the problem using these values. Recent work has shown that including the…