arXiv:2608. 12717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability of large language models lacks spatially resolved, falsifiable tools for testing whether internal components are specialized for distinct cognitive operations.
By Xiang Guan, Roger D. Newman-Norlund, Yong Yang, Saeed Ahmadi, Regan Willis, Nadra Salman, Kalil Warren, Srihari Nelakuditi, Chris Rorden, Leonardo Bonilha, Julius Fridriksson
The study investigates how progressive neuronal loss affects language models by systematically ablating computational units in LSTM and Transformer architectures. LSTMs show a gradual decline in syntactic and semantic abilities, while Transformers exhibit a threshold-like collapse under MLP ablation and a smoother sigmoid-like decline under attention-head ablation. These distinct failure modes mirror different aphasic syndromes, suggesting that architecture-dependent degradation patterns can provide computational insights into neurodegenerative diseases.
By Pratik Worah, Randall Bateman
arXiv:2601. 17952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpretability remains a key challenge for deploying language models (LM) in clinical settings such as progression diagnosis of Alzheimer disease, where early and trustworthy predictions are essential.
By Michail Mamalakis, Tiago Azevedo, Cristian Cosentino, Chiara D'Ercoli, Subati Abulikemu, Zhongtian Sun, Richard Bethlehem, Pietro Lio
arXiv:2608. 06429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpretability methods for large language models (LLMs) describe internal state but do not directly test whether that state is causally sufficient to produce the observed behavior.
By Yong Yang, Roger Newman-Norlund, Xiang Guan, Saeed Ahmadi, Regan Willis, Nadra Salman, Kalil Warren, Sophie Arheix-Parras, Srihari Nelakuditi, Leonardo Bonilha, Christopher Rorden, Rutvik H. Desai, Julius Fridriksson
arXiv:2607. 00397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how complex cognitive functions are organized within artificial systems is central to interpreting large language models (LLMs) and relating them to biological cognition.
By Zhongxiang Sun, Haolang Lu, Qiang Ma, Qi Li, Qipeng Wang, Liang Pang, Chenyu Liu, Qiankun Li, Hao Sun, Kun Wang, Yi Zeng, Jun Xu, Guoqi Li, Ji-Rong Wen
The paper argues that neural networks can exhibit modular organization even when individual neurons are not specialized. It introduces a nested hierarchy of modularity—unit-level, orthogonal, and linear—and shows that many vision, language, and RNN models lack unit-level modularity but still display clear functional modularity at the subspace level. The authors demonstrate that these subspaces can be causally validated through ablation and align with brain data, revealing distinct content/style or syntax/semantics separations.
By Shreya Saha, Benjamin Bergen, Meenakshi Khosla