The paper introduces LLM-Microscope, a toolkit for measuring how Large Language Models encode contextual information at the token level. It shows that seemingly minor tokens—such as determiners, stopwords, and punctuation—carry surprisingly high contextual weight, and removing them degrades performance on benchmarks like MMLU and BABILong-4k. The study also finds a strong link between contextualization and linearity, indicating that the transformation between layers can be approximated by a single linear mapping when tokens are well contextualized.
By Anton Razzhigaev, Matvey Mikhalchuk, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Elizaveta Goncharova, Polina Druzhinina, Ivan Oseledets, Andrey Kuznetsov
arXiv:2609.28117v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a gradient-based head attribution strategy where the Token-level Max-Margin loss is backpropagated to the attention maps....
By Pawe{\l} M\k{a}ka, Yusuf Can Semerci, Jan Scholtes, Gerasimos Spanakis
arXiv:2508. 09904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world forecasting requires models to integrate not only historical data but also relevant contextual information provided in textual form.
By Arjun Ashok, Andrew Robert Williams, Vincent Zhihao Zheng, Irina Rish, Nicolas Chapados, \'Etienne Marcotte, Valentina Zantedeschi, Alexandre Drouin
arXiv:2609.07876v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent methods in language model interpretability employ techniques such as sparse autoencoders to decompose residual stream contributions into linea...
By Arjun Patrawala, Jiahai Feng, Erik Jones, Jacob Steinhardt
arXiv:2607. 11889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models trained on unrestricted internet corpora inevitably embed information from the future, introducing lookahead bias that compromises the validity of backtests and causal inference in finance and the social sciences.
By Bryan Kelly, Semyon Malamud, Johannes Schwab, Teng Andrea Xu
arXiv:2609.22409v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Understanding contextual causality is critical for large language models (LLMs), as it enables them to accurately identify causal relations in specific...
By Yiheng Zhao, Jun Yan, Chengming Hu