Related papers: Engineering Verifiable Modularity in Transformers …
Interpretability research often aims to predict how a model will respond to targeted interventions on specific mechanisms. However, it rarely predicts how a model will respond to unseen input data. This paper explores the promises and…
Although Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress, hallucination, where generated text is not grounded in the visual input, remains a challenge. As LVLMs become stronger, previously reported hallucination…
The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers…
The attention mechanism in its standard implementation contains extraneous rotational degrees of freedom that are carried through computation but do not affect model activations or outputs. We introduce a simple symmetry-breaking protocol…
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in image classification, yet their attention mechanisms often remain opaque and exhibit dense, non-structured behaviors. In this work, we adapt our previously proposed…
We introduce directional routing, a lightweight mechanism that gives each transformer attention head learned suppression directions controlled by a shared router, at 3.9% parameter cost. We train a 433M-parameter model alongside an…
Transformer-based language models exhibit complex and distributed behavior, yet their internal computations remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods typically treat attention heads and multilayer perceptron…
Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…
Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…
The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…
Transformers' quadratic computational complexity limits their scalability despite remarkable performance. While linear attention reduces this to linear complexity, pre-training such models from scratch remains, in most cases, prohibitively…
Mechanistic interpretability has identified small sets of attention heads that implement specific behaviours in transformer language models, but recovering these circuits typically requires a bespoke analytical pipeline for each new task.…
Pre-trained Transformers often exhibit over-confidence in source patterns and difficulty in forming new target-domain patterns during fine-tuning. We formalize the mechanism of output saturation leading to gradient suppression through…
Language-conditioned policies allow robots to interpret and execute human instructions. Learning such policies requires a substantial investment with regards to time and compute resources. Still, the resulting controllers are highly…
Transformers enable powerful content-based global routing via self-attention, but they lack an explicit local geometric prior along the sequence axis. As a result, the placement of locality-inducing modules in hybrid architectures has…
Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) often suffer from hallucinations that stem not only from insufficient visual grounding but also from imbalanced allocation between perception and reasoning processes. Building upon recent…
We propose a geometric taxonomy of large language model hallucinations based on observable signatures in token embedding cluster structure. By analyzing the static embedding spaces of 11 transformer models spanning encoder (BERT, RoBERTa,…
Transformers trained on modular arithmetic exhibit sharp transitions between memorization, generalization, and collapse. We show that weight decay acts as a scalar empirical control parameter for these regimes, and introduce two cheap…
A widely cited result by Dong et al. (2021) showed that Transformers built from self-attention alone, without skip connections or feed-forward layers, suffer from rapid rank collapse: all token representations converge to a single…
Architectural obfuscation - e.g., permuting hidden-state tensors, linearly transforming embedding tables, or remapping tokens - has recently gained traction as a lightweight substitute for heavyweight cryptography in privacy-preserving…