BERT

text · discriminative · anchor

Variants

BERT-base, BERT-base-uncased, BERT-L, BERT-large

Findings

• IC-1005Social bias neurons in BERT-base-cased and RoBERTa-base are concentrated in the deepest transformer layers
• IC-1017Vision and language models pre-trained on noisy data exhibit degraded OOD transfer that is partially recoverable via SVD-based feature-space regularization
• IC-1409FF blocks in BERT and GPT-2 modify token-to-token contextualization, with the effect concentrated in specific layers and targeting specific linguistic compositions rather than simple word co-occurrence
• IC-1410FF's contextualization effects in BERT and GPT-2 are largely canceled by the residual connection and layer normalization, with LN's γ weights specifically shrinking the outlier dimensions in FF output
• IC-1431BERT-base fine-tuning has negligible distribution-wise variance (0.21%) while BERT-large fine-tuning has substantial distribution-wise variance (2.08%) on MRPC
• IC-1544The latent spaces of pretrained foundational models across vision and text are not related by a single class of geometric transformations; the optimal alignment depends on the specific model pair, architecture, and dataset.
• IC-636Syntactic phenomena (determiner-noun and subject-verb agreement) localize to the same topmost-layer MLP neurons as factual information in BERT, GPT-2, and Llama-2
• IC-637KN edit (neuron suppression) has low reliability, overturning at most 5.2% of BLIMP categorical predictions and achieving only 1.66%–47.86% reliability on factual tasks
• IC-913In OPT-2.7B, Pythia-70M/1.4B/6.9B, and BERT-base, the stable rank of MLP lower layers shows a drop-and-bounce pattern during training that is more salient in top layers while bottom layers show suppressed dropping curves
• IC-914In Pythia models (70M through 2.8B), BERT-base, OPT-6.7B, LLaMA-2-7B, and ViT-Huge, the MLP out-projection vectors are almost orthogonal throughout training
• IC-936GPT-2's learned positional encodings cause context vectors to lose linear independence after one layer, whereas BERT's sinusoidal encodings preserve it
• IC-945LLaMA-2, MPT, Falcon, Pythia, and BERT-base-uncased allocate disproportionate attention to initial tokens regardless of their semantic content

Shared mechanisms

• Depth-dependent structurealso in Baichuan 2, BLIP-2, BLOOM, Chameleon, CLIP / CLIP-ViT (LC), DeepFloyd IF, DeiT-III, DINO, DINOv2, Falcon, Gemma, Gemma 2, GPT-2, GPT-J, GPT-NeoX-20B, Griffin, I3D, Idefics, InstructBLIP, LLaMA, Llama 2 / Llama 2 base, Llama 3, Llama 3.1, Llama 3.2, Llama-3.2-3B, LLaVA, LLaVA-1.5 / LLaVA-v1.5, LLaVA-Phi, MAE, MAE-B/16, Mamba, MiniGPT-4, Mistral 7B / Mistral / Mistral 3 7B / Mistral-0.2-7B / Mistral-v0.1, Mixtral 8x7B / Mistral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral 46.7B / Mixtral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral-instruct-8x7b, mPLUG-Owl, MPT, MultiBERTs, MViT V2, OLMo / OLMo base, OpenCLIP, OPT, Phi-2, Pythia, Qwen 2, Qwen2-VL, Qwen2.5, RoBERTa / RoBERTa-L, RWKV, SALMONN, SAM, SlowFast, Stable Diffusion, Swin Transformer, TerraMind, TimesFormer, TSM, Uniformer, Vicuna, VideoMAE, ViT, X3D, Yi
• Failure modealso in AASIST, ADM, Aegis-Guard-Defensive, Alpaca, AnyLoc, AutoTikZ / DataTikZ, Baichuan, Baichuan 2, Baichuan2-13B, BakLLaVA, Bard, BEiT, BingChat, BLIP, BLIP-2, BLOOM, BSRNet, CF2, Chat-UniVi-7B, ChatGLM-6B / ChatGLM-6b-2, ChatGLM2, ChatGPT, CLAP, Claude 1.3, Claude 2.0, Claude 2.1, Claude 3, Claude 3.5, CLEAR, CLIP / CLIP-ViT (LC), CLIP4Clip, CLIPBERT, CLIPCap, CLMBR-T-BASE, CloFNet, Code Llama, CodeGeex2, CodeGen, CodeLlama-13B, CodeLlama-34B, CogVLM2, Cohere Command R, CoMEt, Command R+, CONCH, CycleGAN, DALL-E, DALL·E 2, DALL·E 3, DASR, DECAF, DeepSeek-2-Chat, DeepSeek-2-Coder, DeepSeek-V2-0628, DeepSeek-VL, DeepSeek-VL2, DeiT, DeiT-III, Depth Anything, DETR-R50, DimeNet++, DINO, DINO-FocalNet-Large, DINOv2, EGNN, Emu2, EquiformerV2, ESCN, ESM-2, ESM3, ESRGAN, EVA-CLIP, EVE, Falcon, Faster R-CNN / Faster R-CNN R50 / Faster R-CNN X101, FLAN-T5, Florence-2, FLUX / FLUX1, FoveaBox, Fuyu, Galactica-6.7B, GAT, 3D Gaussian Splatting, GCN, Gemini, Gemini 1.5 / Gemini Pro 1.5, Gemma, Gemma 2, GIN, GLIDE, GLM-4, GLM-4V, GloVe, GP-UNIT, GPT-2, GPT-3 / GPT base, GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT-3.5, GPT-4 / ChatGPT4 / GPT-4 Code Interpreter / GPT-4 Technical Report, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, GPT-J, GPT-NeoX-20B, GraphSAGE, Grounding DINO, Guanaco, GVP, Hawkeye, HiFaceGAN, HPS, HuggingGPT, IDDPM, Idefics, Idefics2, ImageBind, ImageBind-LLM-7B, Imagen Video, ImageReward, 12-in-1, InstructBLIP, InstructGPT, InternLM-2.5-7B, InternLM-XComposer2-VL, InternVideo, InternVL-1.5, InternVL2, Koala, LegalBERT, LLaMA, Llama 2 / Llama 2 base, Llama 3, Llama 3.1, Llama 3.2, Llama-3.2-3B, Llama-3-2-Vision, LLaMA-Adapter v2, Llama Guard, Llama Guard 2, Llama-Guard 3, Llama-VID, LLaVA, LLaVA-1.5 / LLaVA-v1.5, LLaVA-Med, LLaVA-NeXT / LLaVA 1.6, LLaVA-OneVision, LongVA-7B, LOVT, LWM-1M-JAX, MACE, MAE, Med-Flamingo, Merlot Reserve, MGCA, MiDaS, MiniCPM-V, MiniGPT-4, Mip-Splatting, Mistral 7B / Mistral / Mistral 3 7B / Mistral-0.2-7B / Mistral-v0.1, Mistral Large 2, Mistral Large V2, Mixtral, Mixtral 8x7B / Mistral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral 46.7B / Mixtral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral-instruct-8x7b, MobileNetV2, Molmo, MolmoE-7B, Momentor, Moondream2, Moonshot-v1-8k, mPLUG-2, mPLUG-Owl, mPLUG-Owl3, mPLUG-Owl2, MPT, MSA Transformer, MultiBERTs, Nova Canvas, Nova Lite, Nova Pro, O1 / OpenAI-o1-preview, O3, O4-mini, OLMo / OLMo base, OneLLM, OpenAI Moderation, OpenChat-3.5-0106, OpenCLIP, OpenFlamingo, OPT, Otter, Otter-7B, PaLM 2, PaLM 62B, PandaGPT-7B, PerSAM, Phi-3, Phi-3.5 Mini Instruct, PickScore, PLIP, Prismatic, ProGen-2, Pythia, Qwen1.5, Qwen 2, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct, Qwen2-VL, Qwen-Audio, Qwen-VL, Qwen2.5, Qwen2-Audio, R2D2, RadFM, RCExplainer, RD-SR, RealESRNet, Reprover, ResNet / ResNet-152 / ResNet-101 / ResNet-50-BN, RetinaNet-R50, RivaGAN, RS-LDS, RT-1, RT-2, SALMONN, SAM, SAM 2, SAULLM 54B, Scaffold-GS, SchNet, Seed-LLaMA-8B, SGC, SIREN, Sketch Transformer, SLD-max, SLD-medium, SLD-strong, SLDS, SLIMG, SpeechGPT, SphereNet, SRResNet, Stable Diffusion, StackLLaMA, Starcoder, StegaStamp, StyleGAN2-ADA, Swin Transformer, T5, TD-MPC, TerraMind, TimeChat, TranceptionEVE, TreeRing, Tulu 2, UnifiedQA, UniPerceiver, UNITER, UniVL, Van Gogh Diffusion, VERA, VGG / VGG13, Vicuna, Video-Chat-7B, Video-ChatGPT, Video-LLaMA, Video-LLaMA-2-13B, Video-LLaVA, VideoCLIP, ViLA-8B, ViLBERT, VindLU, VioLET, ViRTex, ViT, ViV1T, VTG-LLM, WildGuard, Wizardlm, X-CLIP, X-InstructBLIP-7B, XGen-MM, Xlm-R, Zephyr-7B-beta
• Positional biasalso in ChatGPT, Claude 3, Claude 3.5, Falcon, Fuyu, Gemini, Gemini 1.5 / Gemini Pro 1.5, Gemma, Gemma 2, GLIDE, GPT-2, GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT-3.5, GPT-4 / ChatGPT4 / GPT-4 Code Interpreter / GPT-4 Technical Report, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, GPT-J, InstructGPT, LLaMA, Llama 2 / Llama 2 base, Llama 3, Mistral 7B / Mistral / Mistral 3 7B / Mistral-0.2-7B / Mistral-v0.1, Mixtral, Mixtral 8x7B / Mistral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral 46.7B / Mixtral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral-instruct-8x7b, MPT, O1 / OpenAI-o1-preview, O3, O4-mini, PaLM 2, Phi-3, Pythia, Qwen1.5, Qwen 2, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct, Stable Diffusion, Sybil, Vicuna
• Scale-dependent behaviouralso in Aquila-7B, BEiT, BLOOM, Claude 2.1, Claude 3, Claude 3.5, CLIP / CLIP-ViT (LC), Code Llama, CodeGen, Cohere Command R, DeepSeek LLM, DeepSeekMoE, DeiT-III, DINO, DINOv2, EquiformerV2, ESCN, Falcon, FLAN-T5, Gemini 1.0 Pro, Gemini 1.5 / Gemini Pro 1.5, Gemma, Gemma 2, GPT-2, GPT-3 / GPT base, GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT-3.5, GPT-4 / ChatGPT4 / GPT-4 Code Interpreter / GPT-4 Technical Report, GPT-4o, GPT-J, GPT-Neo, I3D, Idefics, InternLM-2.5-7B, InternLM-XComposer2-VL, InternLM2, InternVL-1.5, InternVL2, LLaMA, Llama 2 / Llama 2 base, Llama 3, Llama 3.1, Llama 3.2, Llama-3.2-3B, LLaVA-1.5 / LLaVA-v1.5, LLaVA-NeXT / LLaVA 1.6, LongVA-7B, MAE, Mistral 7B / Mistral / Mistral 3 7B / Mistral-0.2-7B / Mistral-v0.1, Mixtral, Mixtral 8x7B / Mistral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral 46.7B / Mixtral 8x7B Instruct / Mixtral-instruct-8x7b, Moirai, MPT, MViT V2, O1 / OpenAI-o1-preview, OLMo / OLMo base, OpenCLIP, OpenFlamingo, OpenLLaMA, OPT, PaLM 2, Phi-3, Platypus2-Instruct-70B, Pythia, Qwen, Qwen1.5, Qwen 2, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct, Qwen2-VL, Qwen-Audio, Qwen2.5, RedPajama-INCITE, ResNet / ResNet-152 / ResNet-101 / ResNet-50-BN, SlowFast, Solar 10.7B, Stable Diffusion, StableLM, Swin Transformer, T5, TerraMind, text-ada-001, TigerBot-70B-Chat, TimesFormer, TSM, Tulu 2, Uniformer, Vicuna, VideoMAE, ViLA-8B, Wizardlm, X3D, XGLM, Xwin-LM-70B-v0.1, Yi