arXiv Computation and Language

Vectors from Larger Language Models Predict Human Reading Time and fMRI Data More Poorly when Dimensionality Expansion is Controlled

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Negligible in Size, Significant in Effect: On Scale Vectors in Large Language Models

The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.

By Mingze Wang, Shuchen Zhu, Yuxin Fang, Binghui Li, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong
arXiv AI
Aug 12

Interpreting Language Model Hidden States at Scale

arXiv:2608. 10260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lens methods interpret large language models (LLMs) by mapping intermediate activations to the output vocabulary, revealing how next-token predictions develop through the network.

By Jordan Pettyjohn, Mansi Sakarvadia, Nathaniel Hudson, Daniel McKenzie, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster
arXiv AI
Jun 16

OmniMouse: Scaling properties of multi-modal, multi-task Brain Models on 150B Neural Tokens

arXiv:2604. 18827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling data and artificial neural networks has transformed AI, driving breakthroughs in language and vision.

By Konstantin F. Willeke, Polina Turishcheva, Alex Gilbert, Goirik Chakrabarty, Hasan A. Bedel, Paul G. Fahey, Yongrong Qiu, Marissa A. Weis, Michaela Vystr\v{c}ilov\'a, Taliah Muhammad, Lydia Ntanavara, Rachel E. Froebe, Kayla Ponder, Zheng Huan Tan, Emin Orhan, Erick Cobos, Sophia Sanborn, Katrin Franke, Fabian H. Sinz, Alexander S. Ecker, Andreas S. Tolias
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Energy-Based Transformers as Predictors of Reading Difficulty

The paper investigates energy-based transformers as predictors of reading difficulty, extending the use of transformer language models in psycholinguistics. It demonstrates that the energy measure from these models robustly predicts reading times across multiple corpora, outperforming traditional metrics like surprisal and attention entropy. In a controlled experiment on relative clause processing, energy captures known asymmetries, suggesting it may unify previously complementary predictors.

By Jakub Dotlacil, Ece Takmaz