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Wentao Shu

6 accepted papers

2026

A Distributional View for Visual Mechanistic Interpretability: KL-Minimal Soft-Constraint Principle

ICML 2026spotlight

Most current paradigms in visual mechanistic interpretability (MI) remain confined to interpreting internal units of the vision model via heuristic methods (e.g., top-$K$ activation retrieval or optimization with regularization). In this work, we establish a theoretical distributional view for visua…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Dimensional Collapse in Transformer Attention Outputs: A Challenge for Sparse Dictionary Learning

ICML 2026poster

Transformer architectures, and their attention mechanisms in particular, form the foundation of modern large language models. While transformer models are widely believed to operate in high-dimensional hidden spaces, we show that attention outputs are confined to a surprisingly low-dimensional subsp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Evolution of Concepts in Language Model Pre-Training

ICLR 2026poster

Language models obtain extensive capabilities through pre-training. However, the pre-training dynamics remains a black box. In this work, we track linear interpretable feature evolution across pre-training snapshots using a sparse dictionary learning method called crosscoders. We find that most feat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Towards Understanding the Nature of Attention with Low-Rank Sparse Decomposition

ICLR 2026poster

We propose Low-Rank Sparse Attention (Lorsa), a sparse replacement model of Transformer attention layers to disentangle original Multi Head Self Attention (MHSA) into individually comprehensible components. Lorsa is designed to address the challenge of \textit{attention superposition} to understand…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Towards Universality: Studying Mechanistic Similarity Across Language Model Architectures

ICLR 2025poster

The hypothesis of \textit{Universality} in interpretability suggests that different neural networks may converge to implement similar algorithms on similar tasks. In this work, we investigate two mainstream architectures for language modeling, namely Transformers and Mambas, to explore the extent of…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Memorize Step by Step: Efficient Long-Context Prefilling with Incremental Memory and Decremental Chunk

EMNLP 2024main

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advancements, with models like Claude and Gemini capable of processing contexts up to 1 million tokens. However, efficiently handling long sequences remains challenging, particularly during the prefilling stage when input lengths e…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar