Do Llms Dream Of Elephants (when Told Not To)? Latent Concept Association And Associative Memory In Transformers

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity to store and recall facts. Through experimentation with open-source models, we observe that this ability to retrieve facts can be easily manipulated by changing contexts, even without altering their factual meanings. These findings highlight that LLMs might behave like an associative memory model where certain tokens in the contexts serve as clues to