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
The paper demonstrates that Large Language Models, despite their non‑linear components, exhibit a fundamental linearity property: when inputs from two distinct text streams are linearly combined, the model outputs a superposition of the individual next‑token distributions. This "Superposition Linearity Hypothesis" appears to be an intrinsic feature of the Transformer architecture, tends to weaken during pretraining, but can be largely restored with lightweight fine‑tuning. The authors also present a guided decoding method that separates the superposed outputs, allowing two coherent continuations to be generated from a single forward pass.
By Pavel Tikhonov, Anton Korznikov, Matvey Mikhalchuk, Nikita Dragunov, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Polina Druzhinina, Anton Razzhigaev, Ivan Oseledets, Elena Tutubalina