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Iteration Head: A Mechanistic Study of Chain-of-Thought

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arxiv 2406.02128 v2 pith:77QLYMWI submitted 2024-06-04 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.CL
keywords iterationreasoningattentionchain-of-thoughtheadsapparitionappearanceapproximation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities remains limited. This paper helps fill this gap by demonstrating how CoT reasoning emerges in transformers in a controlled and interpretable setting. In particular, we observe the appearance of a specialized attention mechanism dedicated to iterative reasoning, which we coined "iteration heads". We track both the emergence and the precise working of these iteration heads down to the attention level, and measure the transferability of the CoT skills to which they give rise between tasks.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Scalpel vs. Hammer: GRPO Amplifies Existing Capabilities, SFT Replaces Them

    cs.LG 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    GRPO produces modest math gains with small knowledge loss, while SFT gives larger math gains but degrades knowledge benchmarks more, with parameter analyses suggesting the loss comes from larger mid-layer MLP updates.

  2. Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A structured survey of LLM planning methods, benchmarks, and interpretability work, organized around a three-way taxonomy.

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