The study examines how emotions are represented across layers of large language models (LLMs) by probing eight 1B–9B open‑weight models on three datasets (Twitter, Reddit, autobiographical narratives). It finds that the optimal probing layer varies systematically with the dataset, moving from near‑input layers to deeper layers, and that targeted forward‑pass interventions on these layers degrade performance more than random interventions. Additionally, the selected layers transfer across datasets and emotion categories, and early‑exit representations from these layers outperform full‑depth exits by an average of 6.9 percentage points.
By Tian Fang, Ga\"el Guibon, Davide Buscaldi
arXiv:2601. 00181v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns.
By Cheonkam Jeong, Adeline Nyamathi
arXiv:2506.19549v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Identifying which tokens and activations truly influence model predictions is critical for both the efficiency and interpretability of large...
By Debabrata Mahapatra, Shubham Agarwal, Apoorv Saxena, Subrata Mitra
The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.
By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
arXiv:2601.08058v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but the internal signal that trigg...
By Zhenghao He, Guangzhi Xiong, Bohan Liu, Sanchit Sinha, Aidong Zhang
arXiv:2608.29613v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Function vectors (FVs) have recently emerged as a promising mechanism for steering the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by injecting task-spe...
By Jieying Xue, Phuong Minh Nguyen, Minh Le Nguyen, Shogo Okada
arXiv:2603. 06274v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The quadratic computational complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental bottleneck for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts, particularly during the pre-filling phase.
By Lin Niu, Xin Luo, Linchuan Xie, Yifu Sun, Guanghua Yu, Jianchen Zhu, S Kevin Zhou
arXiv:2608.16303v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Long-term emotional-support agents require memory mechanisms for personalized understanding across sessions. However, emotional-support dialogue is...
By Chang Liu, Junyi Zhao, Shuyi Zhang, Changsheng Ma, Yongfeng Tao, Minqiang Yang, Bin Hu
The paper introduces a sequential activation patching framework to study how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting influences large language models over multiple generated tokens. By tracking CoT-conditioned attention-head activations across token positions and aggregating them with Part-of-Speech guidance, the authors identify distributed head sets that jointly contribute to answer generation. Targeted zero-ablation experiments confirm that these heads are functionally important, affecting mechanisms such as reasoning-trajectory maintenance, answer anchoring, exemplar-target separation, and numerical generation.
By Murat Dura, Serkan \"Ozt\"urk, Selma Tekir
arXiv:2608. 09248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skill-based LLM agents select reusable procedures from an external library to solve complex tasks, yet their routing decisions rely entirely on text-level signals such as task descriptions, verbal reflections, and experience-derived rules, while the model's own internal representational state remains unobserved.
By Bohan Lin, Hejia Geng, Xinyi Xie, Heng Zhou, Qinghua Xing, Bo Liu, Chen Zhang, Yudong Zhang
Fine‑tuning reshapes internal representations of large language models, affecting attention patterns and layer‑wise activations. The study shows that components identified by EAP as important for task performance cluster in specific layers, yet these layers do not align with those undergoing the largest representational changes. Additionally, overlapping EAP components across different tasks do not guarantee cross‑task transfer and can even degrade performance when tasks differ in nature.
By Lingfang Li, Procheta Sen, Shubham Das, Danushka Bollegala
DiaRelay introduces a lightweight adapter that lets large language models maintain a constant‑size dialogue‑level memory for emotion recognition in conversation. It builds on LoRA by adding a Selective Relay Memory Transition that aggregates useful historical evidence into a bounded memory, and a Dual‑axis Relay Memory Read that uses this memory to modulate low‑rank feature transformations. Experiments show DiaRelay achieves state‑of‑the‑art weighted F1 and accuracy on MELD with only 7.1 M additional trainable parameters, while also performing competitively on IEMOCAP.
By Zihao Zhou, Bin Yang, Jinghui Qin, Kebing Jin