The study investigates how a large language model (LLaMA2‑7B) aligns with human brain activity during naturalistic language comprehension by using SCRIBE, an interpretable semantic representation of 65 neurocognitively grounded properties. Variance partitioning on fMRI data from seven participants reveals that shared variance between LLaMA2‑7B and SCRIBE dominates across the brain, yet both representations also contribute unique variance. Further analysis shows that concrete semantic properties correlate more strongly with shared variance, while abstract properties do not show increased unique variance, and ablation experiments demonstrate that multiple semantic dimensions cumulatively influence both shared and unique brain-predictive variance.
By Camila Kolling, Mariya Toneva
arXiv:2510.01030v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The human ability to translate diverse perceptual and linguistic inputs into structured behavior has been thought to rest on learning robust repres...
By Zach Studdiford, Timothy T. Rogers, Kushin Mukherjee, Siddharth Suresh
The study compares an English-only and a bilingual decoder-only model, each 310 M parameters, trained on eight diverse languages while controlling for English exposure, compute, and document overlap. After aligning on shared English vocabulary, the authors find that token embeddings appear similar, but the deeper hidden states used for prediction diverge across models. This hidden‑state mismatch grows through middle transformer layers and persists despite controls, indicating that contextual processing differs between the models.
"whyItMatters":"The findings show that embedding alignment can conceal significant internal representation differences, which is crucial for any downstream work that assumes aligned multilingual models are interchangeable."
By Anjishnu Mukherjee, Ziwei Zhu, Antonios Anastasopoulos
The study investigates whether monolingual language models, trained without joint multilingual objectives, develop cross-lingual alignment. By evaluating models such as Goldfish and independently built monolingual systems, the authors find that alignable representational geometry emerges across layers, strengthening with larger data, larger models, or closer linguistic proximity. A single Procrustes rotation on parallel sentences can map hidden states between models, and applying this rotation to a German model’s residuals swaps factual predictions to those of the donor English model, demonstrating functional transfer.
By Ej Zhou, Suchir Salhan, Catherine Arnett, Anna Korhonen
arXiv:2502. 14671v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) representations are known to align with brain activity during language processing, but it remains unclear what drives this alignment.
By Maryam Rahimi, Mohammad Reza Daliri, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
The study investigates whether language models tailored to specific cognitive domains better align with corresponding brain systems. By prompting and fine‑tuning large language models into six domain experts—sensory, spatial, numerical, reasoning, social, and abstract—the authors find that each expert’s representations more closely match the brain region associated with its domain than other experts. This domain‑specific alignment holds across multiple base models and fMRI datasets, while overall prediction accuracy remains largely unchanged, indicating that regional alignment can be obscured when summarizing across the brain.
By Zhivar Sourati, Mengxuan Helen Wu, Nona Ghazizadeh, Jonas Kaplan, Morteza Dehghani, Samuel A. Nastase
The paper investigates whether layer-wise visual‑text similarity in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) truly reflects content‑level cross‑modal interaction. By injecting Gaussian noise into the visual stream of 13 MLLMs, the authors show that task accuracy drops sharply while traditional scalar alignment metrics (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, principal‑angle cosine) fail to distinguish corrupted from clean inputs, a phenomenon they term the alignment illusion. They propose the principal‑angle gap (PA gap) as a more reliable geometric diagnostic that correlates better with task performance and reveals when internal geometry diverges from accuracy.
By Hong-Han Wang, Yuntao Wang, Hu Ding
arXiv:2607. 16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image descriptions represented with language models (LMs) predict human brain responses to naturalistic images in high-level visual regions, but the factors driving this predictivity remain unclear.
By Anna Bavaresco, Ina Klari\'c, Raquel Fern\'andez, Marie-Francine Moens
The paper investigates whether layer-wise visual‑text similarity in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) truly reflects cross‑modal content integration. By injecting Gaussian noise into the visual stream of 13 MLLMs, the authors show that common scalar alignment metrics (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, principal‑angle cosine) fail to distinguish corrupted from intact visual tokens, a phenomenon they term the "alignment illusion." They propose the principal‑angle gap (PA gap) as a more reliable geometric diagnostic that correlates better with task accuracy and reveals when internal geometry diverges from performance.
arXiv:2605. 00025v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech neuroprosthesis systems decode intended speech from neural activity in the absence of audible output, offering a path to restoring communication for individuals with speech-impairing conditions.
By Yuanhao Chen, Peter Chin
The paper extends mechanistic interpretability of large language models by modeling concepts as low‑dimensional non‑linear manifolds rather than linear subspaces. It introduces a concept‑based alignment (CBA) score to compare these manifolds across layers and models, revealing block structures in intermediate layers, a shift from syntax‑dominated to mixed syntactic‑semantic concepts, and training‑dependent multilingual sharing. The study also shows that alignment patterns differ across model families and training stages, with adjacent stages aligning more closely than distant ones.
By Tido Specht, Elias Benedict Krey, Nils Neukirch, Nils Strodthoff
arXiv:2610.22961v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Brain alignment of large language models (LLMs) offers a way to investigate representational similarities between LLMs and the human brain during lan...
By Yuko Nakagi, Yuya Chiba, Yasue Kishino