The paper investigates why current byte‑level language models, which use a hierarchical structure that down‑samples to words and then upsamples back to bytes, struggle with precise character manipulation. Experiments show that pure byte‑level models outperform hierarchical variants on character‑level tasks, and that byte‑level attention is the key component driving this advantage. The study explains the trade‑off between computational efficiency and fine‑grained character understanding in hierarchical byte models.
By Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser
Byte-level hierarchical language models (LMs) have recently emerged as a robust alternative to their popular counterparts that use subword tokenization. However, generating one byte at a time remains...
arXiv:2608.27658v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Subword tokenization hinders low-resource language processing by imposing frequency patterns from dominant languages onto script-sharing variants. Byte...
By Sanjeev Kumar, Atsuki Yamaguchi, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv:2608. 15454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Byte-level hierarchical language models (LMs) have recently emerged as a robust alternative to their popular counterparts that use subword tokenization.
By Abraham Toluwase Owodunni, Chibuzor Okocha, Christan Grant, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Sachin Kumar
arXiv:2601.06787v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to contain significant redundancy, yet a systematic explanation for why certain components, particularly in...
By Jaewon Sok, Jewon Yeom, Seonghyeon Park, Jeongjae Park, Taesup Kim
The study investigates how lexical perturbations—such as keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion—affect large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks. Four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models were evaluated, revealing that character-level perturbations significantly reduce accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has minimal impact. The authors attribute this asymmetry to Attention Diversion, where fragmented subword tokenization draws disproportionate attention in middle and final transformer layers; they demonstrate that both token content and attention allocation are coupled, making it difficult for inference-time repair strategies to fully recover performance.
By Jiaqian Zhu, Yang Zhang, Junhua Ding, Xiaowei Yu
The study evaluates eleven autoregressive transformer models on English agreement attraction scenarios using a surprisal-based approach. Results show that while transformers match human reading times for prepositional phrase configurations, they perform poorly on object‑extracted relative clauses, with predictions diverging across models and failing to capture human interference patterns. The authors argue that current transformers cannot adequately model human morphosyntactic processing and call for more rigorous, comprehensive testing to avoid misleading conclusions from limited syntactic setups.
By Titus von der Malsburg, Sebastian Pad\'o
arXiv:2609.07876v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent methods in language model interpretability employ techniques such as sparse autoencoders to decompose residual stream contributions into linea...
By Arjun Patrawala, Jiahai Feng, Erik Jones, Jacob Steinhardt
arXiv:2608. 14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models in the ten to one hundred million parameter range are attractive for on device inference, rapid experimentation, and controlled scientific study, yet most of them reuse the standard transformer block without adaptation to the small scale regime.
By Aryuemaan Kumar Chowdhury, Praveen Oosa, Vineesha Reddy
arXiv:2606. 19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions.
By Amiri Hayes, Belinda Li, Jacob Andreas
arXiv:2602. 11852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While state-of-the-art language models (LMs) surpass most humans in certain domains, their reasoning remains largely opaque, reducing trust and increasing the risk of deception and hallucination.
By Yordan Yordanov, Matteo Forasassi, Bayar Menzat, Ruizhi Wang, Chang Qi, Markus Kaltenberger, Amine M'Charrak, Tommaso Salvatori, Thomas Lukasiewicz
A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs.