aiqbench analysis
This study provides causal evidence that specific internal components, such as attention heads and MLP neurons, are functionally linked to a language model's ability to generate narrative structures. By ablating these features, researchers observed increased prediction loss for high-narrativity texts and reduced coherence in story completions across multiple architectures. The findings advance interpretability research by mapping abstract concepts like narrativity to concrete neural mechanisms within large models.
Language Models Have Interpretable Narrative Mechanisms
arXiv:2610.12989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether language models contain internal components that contribute to representing narrativity, the degree to which a text exhibits narrative properties. Across GPT-2-Small, Gemma-2-2B, and Llama-3.1-8B, we identify attention heads, MLP neurons, and sparse autoencoder features whose activations correlate with narrativity. Ablating selected neuron and feature sets increases next-token prediction loss more for high-narrativity than for low-narrativity texts, and reduces the narrativity of open-ended generations. On downstream benchmarks, the largest effects occur in story completion and narrative question answering, although they vary across models and languages; results on confabulation and hallucination benchmarks are mixed. These findings provide causal evidence that selected sets of narrative-associated components contribute to model behaviour, while their internal organisation, relation to narrative theory, and broader functions remain open questions.
Abstract:We investigate whether language models contain internal components that contribute to representing narrativity, the degree to which a text exhibits narrative properties. Across GPT-2-Small, Gemma-2-2B, and Llama-3.1-8B, we identify attention heads, MLP neurons, and sparse autoencoder features whose activations correlate with narrativity. Ablating selected neuron and feature sets increases next-token prediction loss more for high-narrativity than for low-narrativity texts, and reduces the narrativity of open-ended generations. On downstream benchmarks, the largest effects occur in story completion and narrative question answering, although they vary across models and languages; results on confabulation and hallucination benchmarks are mixed. These findings provide causal evidence that selected sets of narrative-associated components contribute to model behaviour, while their internal organisation, relation to narrative theory, and broader functions remain open questions.
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2610.12989 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2610.12989v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12989 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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