Related papers: Transformers Linearly Represent Highly Structured …
While large language models (LLMs) are trained purely on textual data, prior work has shown that their internal representations can exhibit rich geometric structure in embedding space. Building on this line of work, we investigate whether…
Understanding the inner workings of Transformers is crucial for achieving more accurate and efficient predictions. In this work, we analyze the computation performed by Transformers in the layers after the top-1 prediction has become fixed,…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, recent studies have shown that models can still perform complex reasoning tasks even when the CoT is replaced with…
Understanding the inner workings of machine learning models like Transformers is vital for their safe and ethical use. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of a one-layer Transformer model trained to perform n-digit integer…
Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable fluency across linguistic and reasoning tasks but remain systematically prone to hallucination. Prevailing accounts attribute hallucinations to data gaps, limited context, or optimization…
Decoder-only transformers compute the conditional probability of the next token from a sequence of past observations. This paper derives, from first principles, inference architectures that solve the same prediction problem - and in doing…
Recent works have shown that transformers can solve contextual reasoning tasks by internally executing computational graphs called circuits. Circuits often use attention to logically match information from subspaces of the representation,…
Transformer-based models can perform complicated reasoning by generating reasoning paths token by token. While effective, this approach often requires generating thousands of tokens to solve a single problem, which can be slow and…
This paper proposes a transformer over transformer framework, called Transformer$^2$, to perform neural text segmentation. It consists of two components: bottom-level sentence encoders using pre-trained transformers, and an upper-level…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables reasoning in language models but requires explicit verbalization of intermediate steps. Looped transformers offer an alternative by iteratively refining representations within hidden states. This…
Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…
Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts. Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying…
We investigate how and to what extent hierarchical relations (e.g., Japan $\subset$ Eastern Asia $\subset$ Asia) are encoded in the internal representations of language models. Building on Linear Relational Concepts, we train linear…
A significant effort has been made to train neural networks that replicate algorithmic reasoning, but they often fail to learn the abstract concepts underlying these algorithms. This is evidenced by their inability to generalize to data…
Analogy is a central faculty of human intelligence, enabling abstract patterns discovered in one domain to be applied to another. Despite its central role in cognition, the mechanisms by which Transformers acquire and implement analogical…
Language models show a surprising range of capabilities, but the source of their apparent competence is unclear. Do these networks just memorize a collection of surface statistics, or do they rely on internal representations of the process…
Sequential decision-making algorithms such as reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world scenarios inevitably face environments with partial observability. This paper scrutinizes the effectiveness of a popular architecture, namely…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational…
Which components in transformer language models are responsible for discourse understanding? We hypothesize that sparse computational graphs, termed as discursive circuits, control how models process discourse relations. Unlike simpler…
Many NLP applications require models to be interpretable. However, many successful neural architectures, including transformers, still lack effective interpretation methods. A possible solution could rely on building explanations from…