Deep neural networks are widely believed to derive their expressive power from their ability to form \textbf{hierarchical representations}, capturing progressively more abstract and compositional features across layers. In language modeling, \textbf{transformers} have emerged as the dominant architecture, with early layers capturing local syntactic patterns and later layers encoding more complex clause-level dependencies.
arXiv:2602. 06065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how the structure of language can be learned from sentences alone is a central question in both cognitive science and machine learning.
By Jack T. Parley, Francesco Cagnetta, Matthieu Wyart
arXiv:2510. 25013v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) into human-understandable computational circuits.
By Rabin Adhikari
arXiv:2606. 16694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers are widely used as a general-purpose substrate for learning complex correlations between a large collection of coupled variables, but their internal mechanisms have remained mysterious.
By Ravin Raj, Gautam Reddy
arXiv:2605. 18079v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice.
By Moritz Br\"osamle, Stephan Eckstein
arXiv:2506. 07406v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) is a central challenge in interpretability research.
By Yifan Luo, Zhennan Zhou, Bin Dong
arXiv:2608. 06111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional embeddings (PE) in Transformers encode token distance and order but are largely agnostic to \textit{syntactic structure}.
By Haris Riaz, Hyungji Kim, Mihai Surdeanu
arXiv:2603. 06592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Contemporary studies in mechanistic interpretability have uncovered many puzzling phenomena in the neural information processing of Transformer-based language models, such as induction heads, function vectors, and the Hydra effect.
By Jonas Rohweder, Subhabrata Dutta, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2604. 03444v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention.
By William Merrill, Yanhong Li, Tyler Romero, Anej Svete, Caia Costello, Pradeep Dasigi, Dirk Groeneveld, David Heineman, Bailey Kuehl, Nathan Lambert, Chuan Li, Kyle Lo, Saumya Malik, DJ Matusz, Benjamin Minixhofer, Jacob Morrison, Luca Soldaini, Finbarr Timbers, Pete Walsh, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ashish Sabharwal
arXiv:2606. 27538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the context-ready transformer, a new recurrent neural network architecture built from a D-layer transformer block that pre-contextualizes each token before it enters the block.
By Mahesh Godavarti
arXiv:2604. 22128v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering.
By Aryan Sharma, Cutter Dawes, Shivam Raval
arXiv:2311. 17633v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformers have dominated empirical machine learning models of natural language processing.
By Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu