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Tracing Computation Density in LLMs

arxiv.org/abs/2605.27033

Updated 50 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GQ3N9A7FZZGJ58N6FP40

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 50 min ago
arXiv
2605.27033
T1 · 50 min ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 50 min ago

Abstract

-cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) are comprised of billions of parameters arranged in deep and wide computational graphs, but it is not clear that they exploit their full capacity for all inputs. We introduce the s-Trace method to efficiently estimate a subgraph of size s that approximates a full model output. With this method, we find the computation in a variety of LLMs to be organized in two distinct phases. A small subgraph mostly composed of early-layer nodes can reconstruct the head of the full model output distribution. Adding further nodes, mostly located in later layers and increasingly consisting of attention heads, leads to incremental refinements in approximating the full output distribution. We find moreover that the amount of necessary computation per input correlates with model uncertainty, and that sparser subgraphs encode shallow statistics, such as unigram frequency. Overall, our results suggest a consistent modular organization in effective LLM computation, with a sparse early-layer core providing a rough prediction that is further refined through denser computations in later layers.

Authors 5

Corentin Kervadec, Iuliia Lysova, Iuri Macocco, Marco Baroni, Gemma Boleda

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

arXiv id
2605.27033

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Categories
cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

50 min ago

Conflicts

None