arXiv:2603. 19742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the internal mechanisms of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their reliable deployment and effective operation.
By Lasse Marten Jantsch, Dong-Jae Koh, Seonghyeon Lee, Young-Kyoon Suh
The paper introduces ResLRP, an extension of Layer-wise Relevance Propagation that explicitly handles residual connections in Vision Transformers to prevent attribution explosion. It demonstrates that residual cancellation causes instability in ViT explanations, and that ResLRP improves faithfulness and localization across a wide range of ViT architectures, including Vision Language Models. The method also provides a diagnostic measure for predicting attribution degradation and successfully localizes Sparse Autoencoder features.
By Jim Berend, Reduan Achtibat, Daniel Sch\"affer, Alexander Binder, Wojciech Samek, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Maximilian Dreyer
arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.
By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
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...
By Arjun Patrawala, Jiahai Feng, Erik Jones, Jacob Steinhardt
arXiv:2606. 07524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a heterogeneous and poorly documented ecosystem, making systematic model comparison increasingly important for provenance auditing, security analysis, and model selection.
By Zirui Wang, Yusen Hou, Shaofeng Liang, Bowen Tian, Yanlin Zhang, Wenshuo Chen, Yutao Yue
arXiv:2511. 17864v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent research has established that the impact of context in a vanilla transformer can be represented implicitly by forming a token-dependent, rank-1 patch to its MLP weights.
By Adrian Goldwaser, Michael Munn, Javier Gonzalvo, Benoit Dherin
SHIFT-LLM is a training‑free post‑pruning correction framework that inserts a Linear Residual Adapter (LRA) at each depth‑pruned site in large language models. Each LRA preserves the original residual identity while adding a lightweight affine correction calibrated via closed‑form least‑squares regression on a small held‑out set, thereby approximating the hidden state that would have been produced by the removed block. Experiments across multiple model families and benchmarks show that SHIFT‑LLM consistently recovers accuracy lost to depth pruning, achieving gains up to +15.7 points on Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct with only a few hundred calibration samples and no gradient computation.
By Ali Bahri, Hang Li, Hongliang Li, Zhitang Chen
arXiv:2601. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on the stable training of deep Transformer architectures.
By Chao Wang, Bei Li, Jiaqi Zhang, Xinyu Liu, Yuchun Fan, Linkun Lyu, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai
arXiv:2603. 21014v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent and process information.
By Florent Draye, Vedant Palit, Abir Harrasse, Tung-Yu Wu, Jiarui Liu, Punya Syon Pandey, Roderick Wu, Chih-Hao Hsu, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
arXiv:2607. 20652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models are thought to exhibit the phenomenon of superposition, representing many more features than dimensions in their residual streams.
By Andrew Mack, Kraig Yuheng Tou, Mark Henry, Zhengxun Wu, Lauren Greenspan
arXiv:2606. 15796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits.
By Artyom Mazur, Nina Konovalova, Aibek Alanov
arXiv:2607. 02964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does.
By Arnau Marin-Llobet, Stefan Heimersheim