LLM-Microscope: Uncovering the Hidden Role of Punctuation in Context Memory of Transformers
This work addresses the challenge of interpreting context memory in transformers for researchers and practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing analysis methods.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how Large Language Models encode contextual information, revealing that minor tokens like punctuation and stopwords carry high context and their removal degrades performance on benchmarks like MMLU and BABILong-4k. The result includes the introduction of LLM-Microscope, an open-source toolkit for analyzing token-level nonlinearity and contextual memory.
We introduce methods to quantify how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode and store contextual information, revealing that tokens often seen as minor (e.g., determiners, punctuation) carry surprisingly high context. Notably, removing these tokens -- especially stopwords, articles, and commas -- consistently degrades performance on MMLU and BABILong-4k, even if removing only irrelevant tokens. Our analysis also shows a strong correlation between contextualization and linearity, where linearity measures how closely the transformation from one layer's embeddings to the next can be approximated by a single linear mapping. These findings underscore the hidden importance of filler tokens in maintaining context. For further exploration, we present LLM-Microscope, an open-source toolkit that assesses token-level nonlinearity, evaluates contextual memory, visualizes intermediate layer contributions (via an adapted Logit Lens), and measures the intrinsic dimensionality of representations. This toolkit illuminates how seemingly trivial tokens can be critical for long-range understanding.