Large Language Models Share Representations of Latent Grammatical Concepts Across Typologically Diverse Languages

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In this work, we explore the extent to which LLMs share representations of morphosyntactic concepts such as grammatical number, gender, and tense across languages. We train sparse autoencoders on Llama-3-8B and Aya-23-8B, and demonstrate that abstract grammatical concepts are often encoded in feature directions shared across many languages. We use causal interventions to verify the multilingual nature of these representations; specifically, we show that ablating only multilingual features decreases classifier performance to near-chance across languages. We then use these features to precisely modify model behavior in a machine translation task; this demonstrates both the generality and selectivity of these feature's roles in the network. Our findings suggest that even models trained predominantly on English data can develop robust, cross-lingual abstractions of morphosyntactic concepts.

Byte BPE Tokenization as an Inverse string Homomorphism

Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of tokenization has not been well understood. In this work, we demonstrate that tokenization, irrespective of the algorithm used, acts as an inverse homomorphism between strings and tokens. This suggests that the character space of the source language and the token space of the tokenized language are homomorphic, preserving the structural properties of the source language. Additionally, we explore the concept of proper tokenization, which refers to an unambiguous tokenization returned from the tokenizer. Our analysis reveals that the expressiveness of neural architectures in recognizing context-free languages is not affected by tokenization.

Separating Tongue from Thought: Activation Patching Reveals Language-Agnostic Concept Representations in Transformers

A central question in multilingual language modeling is whether large language models (LLMs) develop a universal concept representation, disentangled from specific languages. In this paper, we address this question by analyzing latent representations (latents) during a word translation task in transformer-based LLMs. We strategically extract latents from a source translation prompt and insert them into the forward pass on a target translation prompt. By doing so, we find that the output language is encoded in the latent at an earlier layer than the concept to be translated. Building on this insight, we conduct two key experiments. First, we demonstrate that we can change the concept without changing the language and vice versa through activation patching alone. Second, we show that patching with the mean over latents across different languages does not impair and instead improves the models' performance in translating the concept. Our results provide evidence for the existence of language-agnostic concept representations within the investigated models.

Controllable Context Sensitivity and the Knob Behind It

When making predictions, a language model must trade off how much it relies on its context vs. its prior knowledge. Choosing how sensitive the model is to its context is a fundamental functionality, as it enables the model to excel at tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and question-answering. In this paper, we search for a knob which controls this sensitivity, determining whether language models answer from the context or their prior knowledge. To guide this search, we design a task for controllable context sensitivity. In this task, we first feed the model a context (Paris is in England) and a question (Where is Paris?); we then instruct the model to either use its prior or contextual knowledge and evaluate whether it generates the correct answer for both intents (either France or England). When fine-tuned on this task, instruction-tuned versions of Llama-3.1, Mistral-v0.3, and Gemma-2 can solve it with high accuracy (85-95%). Analyzing these high-performing models, we narrow down which layers may be important to context sensitivity using a novel linear time algorithm. Then, in each model, we identify a 1-D subspace in a single layer that encodes whether the model follows context or prior knowledge. Interestingly, while we identify this subspace in a fine-tuned model, we find that the exact same subspace serves as an effective knob in not only that model but also non-fine-tuned instruct and base models of that model family. Finally, we show a strong correlation between a model's performance and how distinctly it separates context-agreeing from context-ignoring answers in this subspace. These results suggest a single subspace facilitates how the model chooses between context and prior knowledge, hinting at a simple fundamental mechanism that controls this behavior.

Unpacking SDXL Turbo: Interpreting Text-to-Image Models with Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a core ingredient in the reverse engineering of large-language models (LLMs). For LLMs, they have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and subsequent analysis. However, similar analyses and approaches have been lacking for text-to-image models. We investigated the possibility of using SAEs to learn interpretable features for a few-step text-to-image diffusion models, such as SDXL Turbo. To this end, we train SAEs on the updates performed by transformer blocks within SDXL Turbo's denoising U-net. We find that their learned features are interpretable, causally influence the generation process, and reveal specialization among the blocks. In particular, we find one block that deals mainly with image composition, one that is mainly responsible for adding local details, and one for color, illumination, and style. Therefore, our work is an important first step towards better understanding the internals of generative text-to-image models like SDXL Turbo and showcases the potential of features learned by SAEs for the visual domain. Code is available at https://github.com/surkovv/sdxl-unbox

Multilingual Contrastive Decoding via Language-Agnostic Layers Skipping

Decoding by contrasting layers (DoLa), is designed to improve the generation quality of large language models (LLMs) by contrasting the prediction probabilities between an early exit output (amateur logits) and the final output (expert logits). However, we find that this approach does not work well on non-English tasks. Inspired by previous interpretability work on language transition during the model's forward pass, we discover that this issue arises from a language mismatch between early exit output and final output. In this work, we propose an improved contrastive decoding algorithm that is effective for diverse languages beyond English. To obtain more helpful amateur logits, we devise two strategies to skip a set of bottom, language-agnostic layers based on our preliminary analysis. Experimental results on multilingual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous contrastive decoding baselines and substantially improves LLM's chain-of-thought reasoning accuracy across 11 languages. The project will be available at: https://github.com/NJUNLP/SkipLayerCD.

Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers

We ask whether multilingual language models trained on unbalanced, English-dominated corpora use English as an internal pivot language -- a question of key importance for understanding how language models function and the origins of linguistic bias. Focusing on the Llama-2 family of transformer models, our study uses carefully constructed non-English prompts with a unique correct single-token continuation. From layer to layer, transformers gradually map an input embedding of the final prompt token to an output embedding from which next-token probabilities are computed. Tracking intermediate embeddings through their high-dimensional space reveals three distinct phases, whereby intermediate embeddings (1) start far away from output token embeddings; (2) already allow for decoding a semantically correct next token in the middle layers, but give higher probability to its version in English than in the input language; (3) finally move into an input-language-specific region of the embedding space. We cast these results into a conceptual model where the three phases operate in "input space", "concept space", and "output space", respectively. Crucially, our evidence suggests that the abstract "concept space" lies closer to English than to other languages, which may have important consequences regarding the biases held by multilingual language models.

Sketch-Guided Constrained Decoding for Boosting Blackbox Large Language Models without Logit Access

Constrained decoding, a technique for enforcing constraints on language model outputs, offers a way to control text generation without retraining or architectural modifications. Its application is, however, typically restricted to models that give users access to next-token distributions (usually via softmax logits), which poses a limitation with blackbox large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces sketch-guided constrained decoding (SGCD), a novel approach to constrained decoding for blackbox LLMs, which operates without access to the logits of the blackbox LLM. SGCD utilizes a locally hosted auxiliary model to refine the output of an unconstrained blackbox LLM, effectively treating this initial output as a "sketch" for further elaboration. This approach is complementary to traditional logit-based techniques and enables the application of constrained decoding in settings where full model transparency is unavailable. We demonstrate the efficacy of SGCD through experiments in closed information extraction and constituency parsing, showing how it enhances the utility and flexibility of blackbox LLMs for complex NLP tasks.

The CausalBench challenge: A machine learning contest for gene network inference from single-cell perturbation data

In drug discovery, mapping interactions between genes within cellular systems is a crucial early step. This helps formulate hypotheses regarding molecular mechanisms that could potentially be targeted by future medicines. The CausalBench Challenge was an initiative to invite the machine learning community to advance the state of the art in constructing gene-gene interaction networks. These networks, derived from large-scale, real-world datasets of single cells under various perturbations, are crucial for understanding the causal mechanisms underlying disease biology. Using the framework provided by the CausalBench benchmark, participants were tasked with enhancing the capacity of the state of the art methods to leverage large-scale genetic perturbation data. This report provides an analysis and summary of the methods submitted during the challenge to give a partial image of the state of the art at the time of the challenge. The winning solutions significantly improved performance compared to previous baselines, establishing a new state of the art for this critical task in biology and medicine.

Learning DAGs from Data with Few Root Causes

We present a novel perspective and algorithm for learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data generated by a linear structural equation model (SEM). First, we show that a linear SEM can be viewed as a linear transform that, in prior work, computes the data from a dense input vector of random valued root causes (as we will call them) associated with the nodes. Instead, we consider the case of (approximately) few root causes and also introduce noise in the measurement of the data. Intuitively, this means that the DAG data is produced by few data-generating events whose effect percolates through the DAG. We prove identifiability in this new setting and show that the true DAG is the global minimizer of the $L^0$-norm of the vector of root causes. For data with few root causes, with and without noise, we show superior performance compared to prior DAG learning methods.