The paper introduces LLM-Microscope, a toolkit for measuring how Large Language Models encode contextual information at the token level. It shows that seemingly minor tokens—such as determiners, stopwords, and punctuation—carry surprisingly high contextual weight, and removing them degrades performance on benchmarks like MMLU and BABILong-4k. The study also finds a strong link between contextualization and linearity, indicating that the transformation between layers can be approximated by a single linear mapping when tokens are well contextualized.
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...
MGAL is a new multilingual benchmark for evaluating long‑context large language models, built from United Nations reports in six official UN languages and covering 8K to 128K tokens. It tests four linguistic granularities—word, sentence, paragraph, and document—while also stratifying examples by their position within the document (begin, middle, end). Experiments show that models excel at word‑level tasks but struggle with coarser granularity, and that closed‑source models outperform others in lower‑resource languages, revealing challenges such as local semantic crowding and a fluency‑consistency gap.
arXiv:2602. 00462v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transforming a large language model (LLM) into a vision-language model (VLM) can be achieved by mapping the visual tokens from a vision encoder into the embedding space of an LLM.
arXiv:2606. 00909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents MLLM-Microscope, a novel system designed for analyzing the hidden representations within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).
arXiv:2606. 07604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analyzing attention weights has become a standard approach for interpreting the information flow of Large Language Models (LLMs).
arXiv:2607. 11614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) is critical for many real-world applications, yet standard transformers remain constrained by quadratic compute and linear memory scaling.
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
The paper investigates how to effectively pre‑train language models when the data budget is limited but compute is plentiful. It shows that increasing model size only improves performance up to an optimal point, after which overfitting degrades generalization, and that this optimal size varies with both the data budget and downstream tasks. To overcome the inefficiencies of standard Transformers in this regime, the authors propose recursive Transformers that reuse a shared block across depth and employ factorized embeddings, achieving better results than standard models on 10M–100M word pre‑training budgets and competitive performance with BabyLM Challenge 2025 winners.
arXiv:2601. 16407v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples.
The paper studies how transformer representations evolve across layers by examining the intrinsic dimensionality (ID) of token embeddings and their neighborhood structures. It finds that closed‑class tokens expand and collapse earlier than open‑class tokens, and that these changes are linked to shifts in local geometry. The authors compare encoder and decoder models, showing distinct layer‑wise behaviors, and demonstrate that geometric features alone can predict a token’s part‑of‑speech and reveal how semantic content changes across layers.
arXiv:2607. 12279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Writing a sentence of exactly twelve words; ending a DNA sequence at the right codon; formatting an ASCII table.
arXiv:2605. 28854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility in adapting to novel tasks from in-context examples without parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL).