arXiv Computation and Language By Divyansh Agarwal

Relation Before Entity: Deferred Commitment in Language Model Factual Recall

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The paper investigates when relation-type and entity-specific information become active during factual recall in decoder-only language models. Using causal diagnostics across multiple models and prompts, it finds that relation information becomes generation-controlling earlier than entity information, with a temporal gap of 10–16 layers. Despite entity information being present early, its influence on generation is deferred until later layers.

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