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The attention mechanism forms the foundational blocks for transformer language models. Recent approaches show that scaling the model achieves human-level performance. However, with increasing demands for scaling and constraints on hardware…
Extensively evaluating the capabilities of (large) language models is difficult. Rapid development of state-of-the-art models induce benchmark saturation, while creating more challenging datasets is labor-intensive. Inspired by the recent…
Mechanistic interpretability has made it possible to localize circuits underlying specific behaviors in language models, but existing methods are expensive, model-specific, and difficult to scale to larger architectures. We introduce…
Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly focuses on identifying mechanistic explanations for their behaviors, yet the field lacks clear principles for determining when (and how) findings from one model instance generalize to…
We discover that large language models exhibit \emph{spectral phase transitions} in their hidden activation spaces when engaging in reasoning versus factual recall. Through systematic spectral analysis across \textbf{11 models} spanning…
Attention-based methods have played important roles in model interpretations, where the calculated attention weights are expected to highlight the critical parts of inputs~(e.g., keywords in sentences). However, recent research found that…
Attention mechanisms have recently boosted performance on a range of NLP tasks. Because attention layers explicitly weight input components' representations, it is also often assumed that attention can be used to identify information that…
Transformers have dominated sequence processing tasks for the past seven years -- most notably language modeling. However, the inherent quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism remains a significant bottleneck as context length…
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…
This paper introduces an efficient and robust method for discovering interpretable circuits in large language models using discrete sparse autoencoders. Our approach addresses key limitations of existing techniques, namely computational…
Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) aims to reverse-engineer model behaviors by identifying functional sub-networks. Yet, the scientific validity of these findings depends on their stability. In this work, we argue that circuit discovery is…
Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism…
Larger language models become simultaneously better and worse at handling contextual information -- better at ignoring false claims, worse at ignoring irrelevant tokens. We formalize this apparent paradox through the first scaling laws for…
The fields of explainable AI and mechanistic interpretability aim to uncover the internal structure of neural networks, with circuit discovery as a central tool for understanding model computations. Existing approaches, however, rely on…
The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…
Attention plays a fundamental role in both natural and artificial intelligence systems. In deep learning, attention-based neural architectures, such as transformer architectures, are widely used to tackle problems in natural language…
The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as…
Reading comprehension is a challenging task, especially when executed across longer or across multiple evidence documents, where the answer is likely to reoccur. Existing neural architectures typically do not scale to the entire evidence,…
In light of the recent widespread adoption of AI systems, understanding the internal information processing of neural networks has become increasingly critical. Most recently, machine vision has seen remarkable progress by scaling neural…
Quantum language models have shown competitive performance on sequential tasks, yet whether trained quantum circuits exploit genuinely quantum resources -- or merely embed classical computation in quantum hardware -- remains unknown. Prior…