Sparse autoencoders applied to Neural Quantum States extract unsupervised features correlating with and causally steering physical observables such as order parameters while preserving variational energy.
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Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT
48 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 282 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
We analyze the storage and recall of factual associations in autoregressive transformer language models, finding evidence that these associations correspond to localized, directly-editable computations. We first develop a causal intervention for identifying neuron activations that are decisive in a model's factual predictions. This reveals a distinct set of steps in middle-layer feed-forward modules that mediate factual predictions while processing subject tokens. To test our hypothesis that these computations correspond to factual association recall, we modify feed-forward weights to update specific factual associations using Rank-One Model Editing (ROME). We find that ROME is effective on a standard zero-shot relation extraction (zsRE) model-editing task, comparable to existing methods. To perform a more sensitive evaluation, we also evaluate ROME on a new dataset of counterfactual assertions, on which it simultaneously maintains both specificity and generalization, whereas other methods sacrifice one or another. Our results confirm an important role for mid-layer feed-forward modules in storing factual associations and suggest that direct manipulation of computational mechanisms may be a feasible approach for model editing. The code, dataset, visualizations, and an interactive demo notebook are available at https://rome.baulab.info/
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representative citing papers
LLM activations encode current and prior entities in orthogonal slots, but models only use the current slot for explicit factual retrieval despite prior-slot information being linearly decodable.
Grokking arises from gradual amplification of a Fourier-based circuit in the weights followed by removal of memorizing components.
GPT-2 small solves indirect object identification via a circuit of 26 attention heads organized into seven functional classes discovered through causal interventions.
A causal audit of LMLMs finds near-zero parametric leakage after deletion, with surviving correctness coming from retrieval artifacts in the database.
Obliviate erases targeted concepts from autoregressive image generators via KL supervision on visual tokens over full trajectories, cutting nudity rates sharply on benchmarks while keeping general performance.
VLMs default to visual grounding but a sparse circuit of 2.5-4.8% attention heads in later layers mediates prior-knowledge overrides, identified causally via patching and ablation across three model families.
Auditability of subliminal learning is constrained by channel location, with initialization-dependent body channels allowing pre-training screens while vocabulary geometry and conditional body channels evade them.
SWITCH uses explicit <swi> and </swi> boundary tokens to make latent chain-of-thought compatible with on-policy RL (GRPO) and open to causal mechanistic probing, outperforming prior hidden-state recurrence methods.
Fragility, the activation noise level causing probe accuracy collapse, reveals evolving lexical-to-compositional moral encoding, layer robustness gradients, and fine-tuning differences invisible to saturated probing accuracy.
PRISM is a new activation-conditioned model that recovers full sets of simultaneous instructions from LLM hidden states via judge-guided GRPO training and outperforms prior activation-to-language methods on security-relevant tasks.
Face-Feature Tuning is a label-free logit remapping method that reduces FPR/TPR gaps across groups in deepfake detection while preserving overall accuracy.
Locate-then-edit succeeds at the same early-to-mid MLP locations in masked diffusion models as in autoregressive models, but requires optimization over intermediate partial-mask states to handle multi-token targets.
CAS mitigates object hallucinations in MLLMs by extracting two context preference vectors from designed conflict samples and applying signed residual injection at mid-early MLP layers without retraining or added latency.
Counterfactual likelihood tests detect indirect influence through public channels in private reasoning models, validated on a 7B role-channel model showing asymmetric A-to-B influence and complete pathway identification via graph-separation controls.
Stealth Pretraining Seeding plants persistent unsafe behaviors in LLMs via diffuse poisoned web content that activates on precise triggers and evades standard evaluation.
DSCA turns concept isolation into an architectural property by dynamically creating orthogonal subspaces for non-interfering lifelong edits in vision-language models, sustaining over 95% success after 1000 sequential edits.
Norm-Anchor Scaling breaks the norm-feedback loop in sequential LLM editing by anchoring value vectors to original norms, improving long-run performance by 72.2% and extending the editing horizon over 4x.
Activation Addition steers language models by adding contrastive activation vectors from prompt pairs to control high-level properties like sentiment and toxicity at inference time without training.
KV-cache eviction, prompt compression, recurrent state bounding, and agent memory consolidation are unified as one rate-distortion problem with a shared lower bound, shared failure mode, and transferable mechanisms.
ConvMemory v3 introduces a dual-evidence gate for target-conditioned memory validity verification, reporting 90.12% accuracy on synthetic benchmarks, 98.8% transfer to real data, and H@1 improvement from 45.1% to 95.7% in deployment while preserving safety contracts.
Across four language models, the linear direction detecting hallucinated entities achieves perfect separability yet lies at cosine 0.12 from the direction that induces refusal, with the gap unchanged by instruction tuning.
Knowledge editing methods redistribute and suppress rather than overwrite facts in LLMs, creating narrow vulnerable regions in representation space that adversarial prompts can exploit.
A 2x2 ablation shows repeated shared access enables grokking while addressable memory (not recurrence) enables edit propagation in transformer variants on synthetic KG QA.
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When Probing Accuracy Saturates, Fragility Resolves: A Complementary Metric for LLM Pre-Training Analysis
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Rethinking Visual Neglect: Steering via Context-Preference for MLLM Hallucination Mitigation
CAS mitigates object hallucinations in MLLMs by extracting two context preference vectors from designed conflict samples and applying signed residual injection at mid-early MLP layers without retraining or added latency.
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Counterfactual Likelihood Tests for Indirect Influence in Private Reasoning Channels
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ConvMemory v3: A Validity Context Layer for Conversational Memory via Target-Conditioned Relation Verification
ConvMemory v3 introduces a dual-evidence gate for target-conditioned memory validity verification, reporting 90.12% accuracy on synthetic benchmarks, 98.8% transfer to real data, and H@1 improvement from 45.1% to 95.7% in deployment while preserving safety contracts.
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Exposing the Illusion of Erasure in Knowledge Editing for LLMs
Knowledge editing methods redistribute and suppress rather than overwrite facts in LLMs, creating narrow vulnerable regions in representation space that adversarial prompts can exploit.
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Repeated Shared Access Enables Grokking, but Edit Propagation Depends on an Addressable Memory
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Benchmarking Knowledge Editing using Logical Rules
Introduces a benchmark using logical rules from knowledge graphs to generate multi-hop questions that evaluate whether knowledge edits in LLMs propagate to entailed facts, finding up to 24% performance gaps for methods like ROME and FT.
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