Related papers: Architecture Determines Observability of Transform…
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…
As large language models are deployed as autonomous agents with tool execution privileges, a critical assumption underpins their security architecture: that model errors are detectable at runtime. We present empirical evidence that this…
We present the first comprehensive analysis of massive activation development throughout transformer training, using the Pythia model family as our testbed, and release our full dataset publicly to support further research. Through…
Transformer architectures have revolutionized machine learning across a wide range of domains, from natural language processing to scientific computing. However, their growing deployment in high-stakes applications, such as computer vision,…
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…
Neural networks gain capabilities during training, but the internal changes that precede capability acquisition are not well understood. In particular, the relationship between geometric change and behavioral change, and the effect of task…
When do transformers commit to a decision, and what prevents them from correcting it? We introduce \textbf{prolepsis}: a transformer commits early, task-specific attention heads sustain the commitment, and no layer corrects it. Replicating…
We document empirical capability ceilings in decoder-only autoregressive language models across knowledge-intensive tasks. Systematic evaluation of OPT and Pythia model families (70M-30B parameters, spanning 240 times scaling) reveals that…
Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models are increasingly relied upon to evaluate image quality in real-world systems -- from compression and enhancement to generation and streaming. Yet their adoption brings a fundamental risk: these models…
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:…
Maintaining stability in feedback systems, from aircraft and autonomous robots to biological and physiological systems, relies on monitoring their behavior and continuously adjusting their inputs. Incremental damage can make such control…
Current AI safety relies on behavioral monitoring and post-training alignment, yet empirical measurement shows these approaches produce no detectable pre-commitment signal in a majority of instruction-tuned models tested. We present an…
Symbolic regression aims to recover closed-form expressions from numerical data, but in differentiable symbolic regression the recovered expression depends not only on the grammar but also on the fixed architecture through which variables…
Transformers trained on huge text corpora exhibit a remarkable set of capabilities, e.g., performing basic arithmetic. Given the inherent compositional nature of language, one can expect the model to learn to compose these capabilities,…
Prompt injection poses a critical threat to the safe deployment of large language models, yet existing detection approaches are typically evaluated under limited settings that do not reflect real-world operating constraints. In this work,…
Transformers often appear to perform Bayesian reasoning in context, but verifying this rigorously has been impossible: natural data lack analytic posteriors, and large models conflate reasoning with memorization. We address this by…
Interpretability methods aim to understand the algorithm implemented by a trained model (e.g., a Transofmer) by examining various aspects of the model, such as the weight matrices or the attention patterns. In this work, through a…
Recent work has shown that Transformers' compositional generalization is governed by \emph{complexity control}, initialization scale and weight decay, which steers training toward low-complexity reasoning solutions rather than…
We find that models report highest confidence precisely when they are fabricating. Across four model families (OLMo-3, Llama-3.1, Qwen3, Mistral), self-reported confidence inversely correlates with accuracy, with AUC ranging from 0.28 to…
In this paper we prove the existence of a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and robustness in perception-based control, where control decisions rely solely on data-driven, and often incompletely trained, perception maps. In particular,…