arXiv Machine Learning

Cross-Model In-Context Neurofeedback Reveals (Limited) Activation Control in LLMs

arXiv AI
Oct 12

Task Context Shapes Component Roles in Language Models

The study investigates how task context reshapes the roles of shared attention heads in large language models. By applying identical graph facts and measuring interventions on attention heads and downstream activations, the authors show that task changes redistribute influence across five open‑weight models, causing the same heads to respond to different facts and affect later components differently. Linear response maps before and after activation edits reveal significant reductions in prediction error, indicating that task context alters both the facts processed and the downstream impact of shared components.

By Sovesh Mohapatra, Dani S Bassett
arXiv AI
Sep 2

In-Context Neurofeedback: Can LLMs Control Their Internal Representations through Privileged Access?

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can control their own internal representations, a question relevant to machine metacognition and AI safety. Previous work claimed such control using neurofeedback, but the targets were not privileged, allowing third‑party inference from prompts. By redesigning the paradigm to enforce privileged access—mirroring human neurofeedback experiments—the authors find that LLMs fail to reliably control these internal representations, indicating that earlier claims may have relied on superficial mechanisms.

By Koshiro Aoki, Ryota Takatsuki, Gouki Minegishi, Yusuke Haruki, Daisuke Kawahara
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos