Are Linguistic and Arithmetic Circuits Dissociated in LLMs?
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit both knowledge of language, rendered by, for example, grammatical judgment ability, and abilities to perform tasks through language, such as math-word problem solving. Motivated by neurolinguistic studies of their neural dissociation in human brains, in this study, we investigate the overlap of their circuits in large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we examine the overlap and causal effects between the circuits extracted for linguistic and arithmetic tasks, using controlled materials and circuit discovery methods from the mechanistic interpretability field. Our experiments with five LLMs show that circuit similarity is mostly explained by task do...
| Authors | Riku Kisako, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Ryohei Sasano |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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