Back Attention: Understanding and Enhancing Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigate how large language models (LLMs) perform latent multi-hop reasoning in prompts like "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's mother's spouse is".To analyze this process, we introduce logit flow, an interpretability method that traces how logits propagate across layers and positions toward the final prediction.Using logit flow, we identify four distinct stages in single-hop knowledge prediction: (A) entity subject enrichment, (B) entity attribute extraction, (C) relation subject enrichment, and (D) relation attribute extraction.Extending this analysis to multi-hop reasoning, we find that failures often stem from the relation attribute extraction stage, where conflicting logits reduce prediction accuracy.To address this, we propose back attention, a novel mechanism that enables lower layers to leverage higher-layer hidden states from different positions during attention computation.With back attention, a 1-layer transformer achieves the performance of a 2-layer transformer.Applied to five LLMs, back attention improves accuracy on five reasoning datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing latent multi-hop reasoning ability.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it