arXiv AI By James Henry

The Concept Allocation Zone: Tracking How Concepts Form Across Transformer Depth

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arXiv:2605. 24856v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concept formation in transformer language models is a depth-extended process, not a single-layer event: a concept becomes separable across one or more contiguous regions of the residual stream - its Concept Allocation Zone (CAZ).

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Exemplar Partitioning for Mechanistic Interpretability

The paper introduces Exemplar Partitioning (EP), an unsupervised technique that constructs interpretable feature dictionaries from large language model activations by clustering streamed activations into Voronoi regions defined by exemplars and their averages. EP allows comparison of dictionaries across layers, checkpoints, and architectures, and demonstrates utility in interpreting model behavior, tracking training dynamics, detecting hidden concepts, and enabling targeted interventions. Experiments on Gemma‑2‑2B and Llama‑3.1‑8B show EP can reveal how instruction tuning reorganizes harmful prompt activations, facilitate interventions that alter model responses, and achieve high concept‑detection performance while requiring far fewer construction tokens than comparable methods.

By Jessica Rumbelow