arXiv:2602. 23164v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models must handle multiple generative processes, yet mechanistic interpretability largely studies capabilities in isolation; it remains unclear how a single transformer organizes multiple, potentially conflicting "world models".
By Aviral Chawla, Galen Hall, Juniper Lovato
arXiv:2601. 22510v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often achieve strong benchmark accuracy yet remain brittle under small distribution shifts.
By Xingyu Zhao, Darsh Sharma, Rheeya Uppaal, Yiqiao Zhong
arXiv:2607. 01232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central component of post-training large language models (LLMs), yet little is understood about how RL adaptation is distributed across transformer layers.
By Zijian Zhang, Rizhen Hu, Athanasios Glentis, Dawei Li, Chung-Yiu Yau, Hongzhou Lin, Mingyi Hong
arXiv:2607. 11875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models.
By Tiberiu Musat, Tiago Pimentel, Nicholas Zucchet, Thomas Hofmann
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.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2606. 05194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed to make decisions that require trading off near-term gains against long-term consequences, yet little is known about how they internally represent or resolve these tradeoffs.
By Ian Rios-Sialer, Shantanu Darveshi, Shuai Jiang, Avigya Paudel, Anastasiia Pronina, Ipshita Bandyopadhyay, Justin Shenk
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).
By Hua-Dong Xiong, Li Ji-An, Robert C. Wilson, Kwonjoon Lee, Xue-Xin Wei
We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning.
arXiv:2602. 22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training selects for behavior, not circuitry: many weight configurations can implement the same function.
By Joshua S. Schiffman
arXiv:2601. 21996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Mechanistic Interpretability has identified interpretable circuits in LLMs, their causal origins in training data remain elusive.
By Jianhui Chen, Yuzhang Luo, Liangming Pan
arXiv:2608. 12334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models, the latent dynamics dictating language selection remain poorly understood.
By Arnav Srivastav
arXiv:2604. 00830v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Time Learning (TTL) enables language agents to iteratively refine their performance through repeated interactions with the environment at inference time.
By Zhanzhi Lou, Hui Chen, Yibo Li, Qian Wang, Bryan Hooi