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Alberto Cazzaniga

6 accepted papers

2025

Head Pursuit: Probing Attention Specialization in Multimodal Transformers

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models specialize in specific semantic or visual attributes. Build…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Persistent Topological Features in Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Understanding the decision-making processes of large language models is critical given their widespread applications. To achieve this, we aim to connect a formal mathematical framework—zigzag persistence from topological data analysis —with practical and easily applicable algorithms. Zigzag persiste…

2025

The Narrow Gate: Localized Image-Text Communication in Native Multimodal Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in multimodal training have significantly improved the integration of image understanding and generation within a unified model. This study investigates how vision-language models (VLMs) handle image-understanding tasks, focusing on how visual information is processed and transferred…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Competition of Mechanisms: Tracing How Language Models Handle Facts and Counterfactuals

ACL 2024long

Interpretability research aims to bridge the gap between the empirical success and our scientific understanding of the inner workings of large language models (LLMs). However, most existing research in this area focused on analyzing a single mechanism, such as how models copy or recall factual knowl…

2024

The Representation Landscape of Few-Shot Learning and Fine-Tuning in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

In-context learning (ICL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are two common strategies for improving the performance of modern large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. Despite their different natures, these strategies often lead to comparable performance gains. However, little is known about w…

2023

The geometry of hidden representations of large transformer models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large transformers are powerful architectures used for self-supervised data analysis across various data types, including protein sequences, images, and text. In these models, the semantic structure of the dataset emerges from a sequence of transformations between one representation and the next. W…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar