A Circuit for Plural Reference: How LLMs Represent and Retrieve Singular and Plural Entities

arXiv:2609.03687 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-03 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-03

Updated: 2026-09-03

Code: https://github.com/dangthithaoanh/plural-reference-circuit

Terminology

• Interpretability — 13× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Activation Patching — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing — 4× in this paper
• Attention Mechanism — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 3× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Abstraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Causal Inference — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Explainability — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Transformer Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• On Mechanistic Circuits for Extractive Question-Answering
• Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety -- A Review
• A Primer on the Inner Workings of Transformer-based Language Models
• Localizing Model Behavior with Path Patching
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Do Attention Heads in BERT Track Syntactic Dependencies?
• Are Large Language Models Robust Coreference Resolvers?
• Does Circuit Analysis Interpretability Scale? Evidence from Multiple Choice Capabilities in Chinchilla
• The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets
• Fine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking
• Linear Representations of Sentiment in Large Language Models
• Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 small
• Qwen3 Technical Report

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