Task Context Shapes Component Roles in Language Models
Large language models reuse the same attention heads across tasks, but identifying these shared heads does not explain what they do differently in each task. A natural source of inspiration is task-dependent interactions among shared brain regions, which motivate a network view of language-model computation. Here, we compare fixed model components across tasks using identical graph facts, statements specifying which directed connections are present. We measure how interventions affect attention heads and the activation state in later layers (influence), as well as the answer (importance). Task changes redistribute the influence in five open-weight models spanning four families and 1.5-14 ...
| Authors | Sovesh Mohapatra, Dani S Bassett |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 October 2026 |
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