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The extent to which decoder-only language models (LMs) engage in planning, that is, organizing intermediate computations to support coherent long-range generation, remains an important question, with implications for interpretability,…
We train Transformer-based language models on ten foundational algorithmic tasks and observe pronounced phase transitions in their loss curves that deviate from established power-law scaling trends. Over large ranges of compute, the…
Despite the popularity of transformers in practice, their architectures are empirically designed and neither mathematically justified nor interpretable. Moreover, as indicated by many empirical studies, some components of transformer…
Existing adaptation techniques typically require architectural modifications or added parameters, leading to high computational costs and complexity. We introduce Attention Projection Layer Adaptation (APLA), a simple approach to adapt…
The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) has long been hampered by a fundamental conflict within their core attention mechanism: its remarkable expressivity is built upon a computational complexity of O(H N^2) that grows quadratically…
Frozen encoder--decoder language models are stateless: the latent representation is discarded after every forward pass, so no information persists across sessions. This paper presents a \textbf{proof-of-concept pilot study} showing that…
Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works…
How much information do NLP tasks really need from a transformer's attention mechanism at application-time (inference)? From recent work, we know that there is sparsity in transformers and that the floating-points within its computation can…
Different transformer architectures implement identical linguistic computations via distinct connectivity patterns, yielding model imprinted ``computational fingerprints'' detectable through spectral analysis. Using graph signal processing…
Various layer-skipping methods have been proposed to accelerate token generation in large language models (LLMs). However, limited attention has been paid to a fundamental question: How do computational demands vary across the generation of…
Since transformer was firstly published in 2017, several works have been proposed to optimize it. However, the major structure of transformer remains unchanged, ignoring one of its main intrinsic limitations, which is the same static value…
Transformers have achieved extraordinary success in modern machine learning due to their excellent ability to handle sequential data, especially in next-token prediction (NTP) tasks. However, the theoretical understanding of their…
We present a miniature brain transformer architecture that extends the attention-coupled latent memory framework with four additional brain-region analogues: a thalamic relay, an amygdaloid salience module, a prefrontal working-memory (PFC)…
Transformer models have revolutionized natural language processing, achieving state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating remarkable scalability. However, their memory demands, particularly due to maintaining full context in memory, pose…
Compressing transformer weights makes large language models cheaper to deploy. But each layer's compression introduces an error. These errors accumulate as the signal passes through later layers, and how they accumulate is not well…
While transformers achieve strong performance, their internal decision-making processes remain opaque. We investigate whether architectural constraints can enforce interpretability by design through architectural stream independence:…
Multi-turn prompt injection follows a known attack path -- trust-building, pivoting, escalation but text-level defenses miss covert attacks where individual turns appear benign. We show this attack path leaves an activation-level signature…
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…
Transformers resist surgical control. Ablating an attention head identified as critical for capitalization produces minimal behavioral change because distributed redundancy compensates for damage. This Hydra effect renders interpretability…
Attention is a key component of the now ubiquitous pre-trained language models. By learning to focus on relevant pieces of information, these Transformer-based architectures have proven capable of tackling several tasks at once and…