arXiv AI By Xiaoyang Hu, Mike Angstadt, Shane Storks, Zan Huang, Aman Taxali, Alex Weigard, Richard L. Lewis, Chandra Sripada

Conflict and Congruency Effects in Large Language Models: In-Weight and In-Context Competition in a Verbal Conflict Task

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arXiv:2608. 11510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Congruency effects, observed in conflict tasks such as Stroop and flanker tasks, have been investigated for nearly a century in psychology and neuroscience, but their mechanistic basis is not fully understood.

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arXiv Machine Learning
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Pattern Selectivity is Not Task-Causal Structure: A Cross-Architecture Mechanistic Study of Composed-Task Circuits in 1B-Class Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.

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Post-Training Leaves Behavioral Shadows on Unrelated Decisions

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Attention is Case-Sensitive

In human visual perception, uppercase lettering serves as a natural salience cue that captures attention within lowercase text. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical characterization study revealing that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit an analogous property: letter casing modulates internal attention allocation.