Where Animacy Lives in Large Language Models: Tracing the Circuits of the Animacy Concept
Researchers Samuele Punzo, Giovanni Cinà and Sandro Pezzelle investigated how large language models distinguish between living and inanimate objects. By analyzing models like Llama 3.2 and Gemma 3 through minimal pairs and edge attribution patching, they discovered that animacy is a distributed network of components rather than a single localized circuit.