Repeated-Token Counting Reveals a Dissociation Between Representations and Outputs

arXiv:2605.09239v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models fail at counting how many times a word repeats in a list, even though they perform well on far harder reasoning tasks. These failures are commonly attributed to limitations in internal count tracking. We show this attribution is wrong. Linear probes on the residual stream decode the correct count with near-perfect accuracy at every post-embedding layer and they do so even at the exact layers where the wrong answer crystallizes in the output. Attention patterns show no evidence of collapse over repeated tokens and tokenization artifacts account for none of the failure. Instead, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) block at roughly 85--93\% network depth overwrites the correctly-encoded count with a fixed wrong answer. Ablating this block changes the wrong output and establishes it as causally responsible for the failure. The block fires on the space-separated repeated-word format and is absent for repeated digit-tokens. The pattern holds across Llama-3.2 (1B and 3B) and Qwen2.5 (1.5B, 3B and 7B) at consistent relative depth. The count is represented correctly and a specific computation prevents it from reaching the output, so representation failures and routing failures require different interventions.

Abstract:Large language models fail at counting how many times a word repeats in a list, even though they perform well on far harder reasoning tasks. These failures are commonly attributed to limitations in internal count tracking. We show this attribution is wrong. Linear probes on the residual stream decode the correct count with near-perfect accuracy at every post-embedding layer and they do so even at the exact layers where the wrong answer crystallizes in the output. Attention patterns show no evidence of collapse over repeated tokens and tokenization artifacts account for none of the failure. Instead, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) block at roughly 85--93\% network depth overwrites the correctly-encoded count with a fixed wrong answer. Ablating this block changes the wrong output and establishes it as causally responsible for the failure. The block fires on the space-separated repeated-word format and is absent for repeated digit-tokens. The pattern holds across Llama-3.2 (1B and 3B) and Qwen2.5 (1.5B, 3B and 7B) at consistent relative depth. The count is represented correctly and a specific computation prevents it from reaching the output, so representation failures and routing failures require different interventions.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2605.09239 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2605.09239v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.09239 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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Repeated-Token Counting Reveals a Dissociation Between Representations and Outputs

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