activity
20232026
most citedHow does GPT-2 compute greater-than?: Interpreting mathematical abilities in a pre-trained language model

14 citations · 19 across the 11 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

12 papers

cs.CL2026

Latent Planning Emerges with Scale

Michael Hanna, Emmanuel Ameisen

LLMs can perform seemingly planning-intensive tasks, like writing coherent stories or functioning code, without explicitly verbalizing a plan; however, the extent to which they imp…

cs.LG2025★ 1 cited

MIB: A Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark

Aaron Mueller, Atticus Geiger, Sarah Wiegreffe +20

How can we know whether new mechanistic interpretability methods achieve real improvements? In pursuit of lasting evaluation standards, we propose MIB, a Mechanistic Interpretabili…

cs.CL2025

Are formal and functional linguistic mechanisms dissociated in language models?

Michael Hanna, Yonatan Belinkov, Sandro Pezzelle

Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable, these capabilities are unevenly distributed: they excel at formal linguistic tasks, such as producing fluent, gramma…

cs.CL2024★ 1 cited

Incremental Sentence Processing Mechanisms in Autoregressive Transformer Language Models

Michael Hanna, Aaron Mueller

Autoregressive transformer language models (LMs) possess strong syntactic abilities, often successfully handling phenomena from agreement to NPI licensing. However, the features th…

cs.LG2024

LLM Circuit Analyses Are Consistent Across Training and Scale

Curt Tigges, Michael Hanna, Qinan Yu +1

Most currently deployed large language models (LLMs) undergo continuous training or additional finetuning. By contrast, most research into LLMs' internal mechanisms focuses on mode…

cs.CL2024

LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks

Anna Bavaresco, Raffaella Bernardi, Leonardo Bertolazzi +17

There is an increasing trend towards evaluating NLP models with LLMs instead of human judgments, raising questions about the validity of these evaluations, as well as their reprodu…

cs.LG2024★ 2 cited

Have Faith in Faithfulness: Going Beyond Circuit Overlap When Finding Model Mechanisms

Michael Hanna, Sandro Pezzelle, Yonatan Belinkov

Many recent language model (LM) interpretability studies have adopted the circuits framework, which aims to find the minimal computational subgraph, or circuit, that explains LM be…

cs.CL2024

Do Pre-Trained Language Models Detect and Understand Semantic Underspecification? Ask the DUST!

Frank Wildenburg, Michael Hanna, Sandro Pezzelle

In everyday language use, speakers frequently utter and interpret sentences that are semantically underspecified, namely, whose content is insufficient to fully convey their messag…

cs.CL2023★ 1 cited

When Language Models Fall in Love: Animacy Processing in Transformer Language Models

Michael Hanna, Yonatan Belinkov, Sandro Pezzelle

Animacy - whether an entity is alive and sentient - is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always exp…

cs.CL2023

Identifying and Adapting Transformer-Components Responsible for Gender Bias in an English Language Model

Abhijith Chintam, Rahel Beloch, Willem Zuidema +2

Language models (LMs) exhibit and amplify many types of undesirable biases learned from the training data, including gender bias. However, we lack tools for effectively and efficie…

cs.CL2023

ChapGTP, ILLC's Attempt at Raising a BabyLM: Improving Data Efficiency by Automatic Task Formation

Jaap Jumelet, Michael Hanna, Marianne de Heer Kloots +3

We present the submission of the ILLC at the University of Amsterdam to the BabyLM challenge (Warstadt et al., 2023), in the strict-small track. Our final model, ChapGTP, is a mask…

cs.CL2023★ 14 cited

How does GPT-2 compute greater-than?: Interpreting mathematical abilities in a pre-trained language model

Michael Hanna, Ollie Liu, Alexandre Variengien

Pre-trained language models can be surprisingly adept at tasks they were not explicitly trained on, but how they implement these capabilities is poorly understood. In this paper, w…