arXiv AI

In-context superposition: human-like working memory interference in large language models

arXiv:2604. 09670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

Decoupling Internal Representational Changes and Causal Importance in Fine-Tuned Large Language Models

Fine‑tuning reshapes internal representations of large language models, affecting attention patterns and layer‑wise activations. The study shows that components identified by EAP as important for task performance cluster in specific layers, yet these layers do not align with those undergoing the largest representational changes. Additionally, overlapping EAP components across different tasks do not guarantee cross‑task transfer and can even degrade performance when tasks differ in nature.

By Lingfang Li, Procheta Sen, Shubham Das, Danushka Bollegala
arXiv AI
Sep 15

How Many Thoughts Can a Vector Hold? The Capacity of Reasoning by Superposition

The paper investigates how continuous latent states in large language models can store multiple reasoning steps through superposition. It challenges the intuition that retaining only the current reasoning frontier is optimal, showing that cumulative superposition of the full reasoning history can actually require fewer representational dimensions. The authors demonstrate that this approach preserves more valid evidence, improves downstream outcome discrimination, and delays unreliability, while also establishing that uniform cumulative weighting of memories is minimax‑optimal for future reasoning.

By Hongyu Gu, Chang Liu, Jingwen Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Resonant Context Anchoring: Decoupling Attention Routing and Signal Gain at Inference Time

arXiv:2606. 01923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit "contextual disregard" when faced with input evidence that conflicts with their internal parametric memory, leading to persistent factual hallucinations.

By Mingkuan Zhao, Yide Gao, Wentao Hu, Suquan Chen, Tianchen Huang, Zhenhua An, Zetao Chang, Xiayu Sun, Yuheng Min
arXiv AI
Aug 14

From Observation to Intervention: Memory in Brains and Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 12377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Brains and large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally different memory systems, but they can be compared through shared functional questions: where memory-related information is represented, how partial cues recover broader associations, how new information is written or updated, and how memory-related states can be perturbed.

By Morteza Salehjahromi, Shayan A. Zadegan, Amgad Muneer, Jia Wu