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We observe an empirical phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) -- very few activations exhibit significantly larger values than others (e.g., 100,000 times larger). We call them massive activations. First, we demonstrate the widespread…
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their impressive capabilities, often fail to accurately repeat a single word when prompted to, and instead output unrelated text. This unexplained failure mode represents a vulnerability, allowing even…
This paper studies the emergence of interpretable categorical features within large language models (LLMs), analyzing their behavior across training checkpoints (time), transformer layers (space), and varying model sizes (scale). Using…
Motivated in part by their relevance for low-precision training and quantization, massive activations in large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a topic of interest. However, existing analyses are limited in scope, and…
Multilingualism in Large Language Models (LLMs) is an yet under-explored area. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the multilingual capabilities of a family of a Large Language Model, examining its architecture, activation…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities without being pre-trained on specially curated multilingual parallel corpora. It remains a challenging problem to explain the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs…
Investigating outliers in large language models (LLMs) is crucial due to their significant impact on various aspects of LLM performance, including quantization and compression. Outliers often cause considerable quantization errors, leading…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often allocate disproportionate attention to specific tokens, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the attention sink. While such sinks are generally considered detrimental, prior studies have identified a…
Language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as attention sink. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context…
Attention sinks and compression valleys have attracted significant attention as two puzzling phenomena in large language models, but have been studied in isolation. In this work, we present a surprising connection between attention sinks…
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning and verifiable rewards have achieved strong results on complex reasoning tasks. Recent work extends this paradigm to a multi-agent setting, where a meta-thinking agent…
Large language models often reason beyond surface tokens, but the internal stage at which token-level information becomes abstract relational structure remains unclear. We investigate this question by analyzing how attention heads and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are leading a new technological revolution as one of the most promising research streams toward artificial general intelligence. The scaling of these models, accomplished by increasing the number of parameters…
Many recent studies have found evidence for emergent reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), but debate persists concerning the robustness of these capabilities, and the extent to which they depend on structured reasoning…
As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their capacity to function effectively across a diverse range of languages has shown marked improvement. Preliminary studies observe that the hidden activations of LLMs often resemble…
In this work, we argue that large language models (LLMs), though trained to predict only the next token, exhibit emergent planning behaviors: $\textbf{their hidden representations encode future outputs beyond the next token}$. Through…
The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…
Practitioners have consistently observed three puzzling phenomena in transformer-based large language models (LLMs): attention sinks, value-state drains, and residual-state peaks, collectively referred to as extreme-token phenomena. These…
Transformer-based language models such as BERT having 110M+ parameters have revolutionized natural language understanding, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque to researchers and practitioners. Traditional attention-based…
R1-style LLMs have attracted growing attention for their capacity for self-reflection, yet the internal mechanisms underlying such behavior remain unclear. To bridge this gap, we anchor on the onset of reflection behavior and trace its…