A Mechanistic Interpretation of Arithmetic Reasoning in Language Models using Causal Mediation Analysis
Alessandro Stolfo,
Yonatan Belinkov,
Mrinmaya Sachan
Abstract: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 component… Show more
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