arXiv Computation and Language

Layer-wise Target Propagation: Efficient Component Attribution through Target Centric Propagation

arXiv AI
Sep 16

ResLRP: The Role of Residual Cancellation in Attribution Instability in Vision Transformers

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 AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

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 Machine Learning
Sep 10

LLM Layers Immediately Correct Each Other

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 AI
Jun 9

ABLE: Representing and Mapping LLMs via Attribution-Based Large-model Embedding

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 Computer Vision
Aug 27

SHIFT-LLM: Distribution Shift Correction in Depth-Pruned LLMs

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