Do Syntax Heads Influence Model Behavior?
Transformer language models develop attention heads that specialize in syntactic relations, for example, attending from verbs to their subjects. Do these heads play a causal role in the model's syntactic predictions? Evidence for such a role is mixed to negative: even when we force these heads to attend to a distractor noun other than the subject, the model's syntactic predictions are still more consistent with the subject than with the distractor. Interventions on specialized syntax heads had a significantly stronger effect on syntactic predictions than interventions on random heads, but only in one of the two measures we propose.
| Authors | William Timkey, Tal Linzen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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