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Tracing Computation Density in LLMs

arxiv.org/abs/2605.27033

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Updated 2 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GQ3N9A7FZZGJ58N6FP40

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 2 h ago
arXiv
2605.27033
T1 · 2 h ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 2 h ago

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-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.currentcurrentarXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1highdeterministic

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