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: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 examined whether brain-language model alignment reflects shared computational mechanisms or merely stable lexical‑semantic correspondences. Using whole‑brain encoding across Mandarin, English, and French, transformer representations predicted activity in a distributed network that overlapped across languages and remained stable across layers. Contextual embeddings and measures of prediction or compression did not outperform static lexical embeddings, suggesting that alignment is robust but not informative about shared computational processes.
By Ni Yang, Rui He, Philipp Homan, Iris Sommer, Davide Staub, Wolfram Hinzen
The paper demonstrates that Large Language Models, despite their non‑linear components, exhibit a fundamental linearity property: when inputs from two distinct text streams are linearly combined, the model outputs a superposition of the individual next‑token distributions. This "Superposition Linearity Hypothesis" appears to be an intrinsic feature of the Transformer architecture, tends to weaken during pretraining, but can be largely restored with lightweight fine‑tuning. The authors also present a guided decoding method that separates the superposed outputs, allowing two coherent continuations to be generated from a single forward pass.
By Pavel Tikhonov, Anton Korznikov, Matvey Mikhalchuk, Nikita Dragunov, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Polina Druzhinina, Anton Razzhigaev, Ivan Oseledets, Elena Tutubalina
The paper investigates the intrinsic dimension (ID) of large language model (LLM) representations as an indicator of linguistic complexity. By comparing ID across model layers for coordination vs. subordination, right‑branching vs. center‑embedding, and unambiguous vs. ambiguous attachment, the authors find consistent ID differences that align with established complexity contrasts. Experiments across six LLMs, including representational similarity and layer pruning analyses, confirm that more complex phenomena produce higher ID profiles, with peaks occurring at different layers for each contrast.
By Marco Baroni, Emily Cheng, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Francesca Franzon
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
arXiv:2510. 18315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate how embedding dimension affects the emergence of an internal "world model" in a transformer trained with reinforcement learning to perform bubble-sort-style adjacent swaps.
By Brady Bhalla, Honglu Fan, Nancy Chen, Tony Yue YU
arXiv:2605.01609v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We find that transformer concept representations systematically anti-concentrate in the spectral tail of the unembedding covariance, encoding...
By Pratyush Acharya, Nuraj Rimal, Habish Dhakal
arXiv:2609.00416v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Probing studies have established that syntactic information is decodable in early and middle transformer layers, but what happens to that information i...
By Christos Nikolaos Zacharopoulos, Revekka Kyriakoglou, Chara Tsoukala, Th\'eo Desbordes
The paper proposes an encoder Transformer that explicitly separates semantic, absolute positional (AP), and relative positional (RP) information, restricting the masked‑language‑modeling objective to the semantic stream. This disentanglement reveals that the AP subspace collapses into a low‑frequency two‑dimensional manifold reflecting document structure, that attention heads specialize into structure‑ and semantic‑oriented groups with RP supporting only the latter, and that standard positional encodings fail to robustly encode macroscopic structure. The approach preserves positional encoding and improves performance on 49 out of 65 linguistic phenomena in the Flash‑Holmes probing benchmark.
By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Camille Barboule, Benjamin Piwowarski
The paper demonstrates that a single internal direction in modern language models—called the valence axis (V-axis)—captures how positive or negative a sentence feels. By using only nine emotion category names and 50 short narrative paragraphs per emotion, the authors identify this axis via principal component analysis of frozen encoder embeddings, achieving 93% of supervised performance on SST‑2 and strong correlations with human valence ratings across images, audio, and brain recordings. The method transfers across modalities without target‑modality labels, but works only for continuous attributes and is specific to certain model families.
By Yousef Radwan
arXiv:2608. 01968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer models are most often understood through what they do: their benchmark performance, generation quality, or behavior on downstream tasks.
By Kunal Kumar Pant, Nithin Nagaraj