On the Generalizability of "Competition of Mechanisms: Tracing How Language Models Handle Facts and Counterfactuals"

TMLR Paper4322 Authors

Abstract:

We present a reproduction study of "Competition of Mechanisms: Tracing How Language Models Handle Facts and Counterfactuals" (Ortu et al., 2024), which investigates competition of mechanisms in language models between factual recall and counterfactual in-context repetition. Our study successfully reproduces their primary findings regarding the localization of factual and counterfactual information, the dominance of attention blocks in mechanism competition, and the specialization of attention heads in handling competing information. We reproduce their results on both GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019) and Pythia 6.9B (Biderman et al., 2023). We extend their work in three significant directions: First, we demonstrate that these findings generalize to even larger models by replicating the experiments on Llama 3.1 8B (Dubey et al., 2024). Second, we investigate the impact of prompt structure by introducing variations where we avoid repeating the counterfactual statement verbatim or we change the premise word, observing a marked decrease in the logit for the counterfactual token. Finally, we investigate the validity of the authors’ claims for prompts of specific domains, discovering that certain categories of prompts skew the results by providing the factual prediction token as part of the subject of the sentence. We find that the attention head ablation proposed in Ortu et al. (2024) is ineffective for domains that are underrepresented in their dataset, and that the effectiveness varies based on domain,
prompt structure and task.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Changes Since Last Submission:

We have revised the introduction to address mistakes in our background references and to improve clarity. The updated version ensures accurate citation of relevant work and proper attribution. None of the claims of the original paper have changed through this revision.

Assigned Action Editor: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez

Submission Number: 4322