Grammatical "grandmother neurons" are rare in LLMs

arXiv:2609.29328 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-24

Updated: 2026-09-24

Comments: Accepted at COLM 2026. 28 pages

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode linguistic structures remains a fundamental challenge in interpretability research.

Terminology

Abstract

Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode linguistic structures remains a fundamental challenge in interpretability research. While diagnostic classifiers (or "probes") are widely used for this task, they face significant methodological criticism: training auxiliary classifiers introduces capacity confounds and calibration issues, often making it difficult to distinguish the model's intrinsic representations from the probe's ability to learn the task. To address these limitations, we introduce a probe-free framework for localizing linguistic selectivity at the individual neuron level. Leveraging the controlled contrasts of linguistic minimal pairs, we propose a Neuron Separability Index (NSI), a metric that directly quantifies how reliably single neurons differentiate grammatical from ungrammatical constructions without parameter updates. Applying NSI across 68 linguistic paradigms and seven checkpoints reveals three main patterns: 1) raw separability reaches near-peak levels earlier for morphological and syntactic distinctions than for syntax-semantics interface and conceptual distinctions. 2) after permutation normalization, single-unit selectivity is sparse, weak, and narrowly tuned: only a small fraction of units are sensitive to an average paradigm, and strongly selective "grandmother neurons" are rare. 3) whole-vector linear separability, single-neuron selectivity, and behavioral competence are largely dissociated, and targeted ablations further separate activation selectivity from causal reliance.

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