Are Arithmetic Heuristic Neurons Form-Invariant? A Mechanistic Analysis of Symbols, Text, and Code in LLMs
Large language models often succeed on one formulation of a problem while failing on an equivalent formulation. Whether these failures arise from distinct internal circuits or different activation states of a shared circuit remains unknown. Recent mechanistic interpretability studies suggest that arithmetic in LLMs emerges from a "bag of heuristics," encoded by a sparse set of MLP neurons that represent distinct arithmetic strategies. We investigate whether arithmetic heuristic neurons are form-invariant across symbolic arithmetic, natural language word problems, and Python code in three Llama-3 models. In each format, we identify arithmetic heuristic neurons using a two-stage pipeline co...
| Authors | Sharath Naganna, Tanvir Ahmed Sijan, Uddipta Kalita |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 July 2026 |
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