Mathematical reasoning in large language models (LMs) has garnered significant attention in recent work, but there is a limited understanding of how these models process and store information related to arithmetic tasks within their architecture.
In order to improve our understanding of this aspect of language models, we present a mechanistic interpretation of Transformer-based LMs on arithmetic questions using a causal mediation analysis framework.
By intervening on the activations of specific model components and measuring the resulting changes in predicted probabilities, we identify the subset of parameters responsible for specific predictions.
This provides insights into how information related to arithmetic is processed by LMs.
Our experimental results indicate that LMs process the input by transmitting the information relevant to the query from mid-sequence early layers to the final token using the attention mechanism. Then, this information is processed by a set of MLP modules, which generate result-related information that is incorporated into the residual stream.
To assess the specificity of the observed activation dynamics, we compare the effects of different model components on arithmetic queries with other tasks, including number retrieval from prompts and factual knowledge questions.

A Mechanistic Interpretation of Arithmetic Reasoning in Language Models using Causal Mediation Analysis | VIDEO

Animacy—whether an entity is alive and sentient—is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always expressed directly in language: in English it often manifests indirectly, in the form of selectional constraints on verbs and adjectives. This poses a potential issue for transformer language models (LMs): they often train only on text, and thus lack access to extralinguistic information from which humans learn about animacy. We ask: how does this impact LMs' animacy processing—do they still behave as humans do? We answer this question using open-source LMs. Like previous studies, we find that LMs behave much like humans when presented with entities whose animacy is typical. However, we also show that even when presented with stories about atypically animate entities, such as a peanut in love, LMs adapt: they treat these entities as animate, though they do not adapt as well as humans. Even when the context indicating atypical animacy is very short, LMs pick up on subtle clues and change their behavior. We conclude that despite the limited signal through which LMs can learn about animacy, they are indeed sensitive to the relevant lexical semantic nuances available in English.

When Language Models Fall in Love: Animacy Processing in Transformer Language Models | VIDEO

Recent advances in interpretability suggest we can project weights and hidden states of transformer-based language models (LMs) to their vocabulary, a transformation that makes them more human interpretable. In this paper, we investigate LM attention heads and memory values, the vectors the models dynamically create and recall while processing a given input. By analyzing the tokens they represent through this projection, we identify patterns in the information flow inside the attention mechanism. Based on our discoveries, we create a tool to visualize a forward pass of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) as an interactive flow graph, with nodes representing neurons or hidden states and edges representing the interactions between them. Our visualization simplifies huge amounts of data into easy-to-read plots that can reflect the models' internal processing, uncovering the contribution of each component to the models' final prediction. Our visualization also unveils new insights about the role of layer norms as semantic filters that influence the models' output, and about neurons that are always activated during forward passes and act as regularization vectors.

VISIT: Visualizing and Interpreting the Semantic Information Flow of Transformers

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**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Yonatan Belinkov

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Presentations

A Mechanistic Interpretation of Arithmetic Reasoning in Language Models using Causal Mediation Analysis | VIDEO

When Language Models Fall in Love: Animacy Processing in Transformer Language Models | VIDEO

VISIT: Visualizing and Interpreting the Semantic Information Flow of Transformers

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