The study investigates whether particular attention heads and individual neurons within those heads in language models are responsible for detecting network infrastructure information—specifically hostnames paired with IP addresses. Using causal ablation and selective testing across five models from three architecture families, the authors find that a small subset of heads reliably identifies such information with near-perfect accuracy. However, the extent to which this responsibility is concentrated in a single neuron varies by model; in some cases a single neuron suffices, while in others the signal is distributed across the head. The findings generalize to an independent reverse‑DNS dataset, though single‑neuron detectors are less robust.
By Abdul Kadir (University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), Md Mohasin Hossain (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germany), Daniel Sonntag (University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
Ask a pretrained biomedical language model whether "cortisol 28 ug/dL" and "stock-market volatility" are related, and it returns a cosine similarity of 0. 83 on a scale where 1.
arXiv:2606. 09672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ask a pretrained biomedical language model whether "cortisol 28 ug/dL" and "stock-market volatility" are related, and it returns a cosine similarity of 0.
By Suraj Biswas, Saurabh Gupta, Pritam Mukherjee
The study investigates the consistency and specificity of language model circuits across six tasks and five models, focusing on component-level (attention heads and MLP blocks) and neuron-level circuits. Component-level circuits are highly consistent and causally important but lack task specificity, as ablating a circuit for one task similarly harms performance on other tasks. Neuron-level circuits show higher task specificity but lower consistency, with overlap mainly between closely related tasks. The analysis of Llama‑3.2‑3B reveals that shared components are predominantly MLP blocks, while attention heads act as generic attention‑sink heads.
By Michael Li, Nishant Subramani
arXiv:2610.20179v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Probes on activation vectors are widely used to detect misbehavior in language models, but their success relies on the assumption that models cannot...
By Davide Baldelli, Robyn Kozierok, Mirko Bronzi, Damiano Fornasiere
arXiv:2608. 05624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophantic responses are becoming pervasive in large language models (LLMs), and prior work has pointed out that some of them could be harmful.
By Bohan Jiang, Dawei Li, Yasin Silva, Huan Liu