























This paper investigates the emergence of Theory-of-Mind (ToM) capabilities in large language models (LLMs) from a mechanistic perspective, focusing on the role of extremely sparse parameter patterns. We introduce a novel method to identify ToM-sensitive parameters and reveal that perturbing as little as 0.001% of these parameters significantly degrades ToM performance while also impairing contextual localization and language understanding. To understand this effect, we analyze their interaction with core architectural components of LLMs. Our findings demonstrate that these sensitive parameters are closely linked to the positional encoding module, particularly in models using Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), where perturbations disrupt dominant-frequency activations critical for contextual processing. Furthermore, we show that perturbing ToM-sensitive parameters affects LLM's attention mechanism by modulating the angle between queries and keys under positional encoding. These insights provide a deeper understanding of how LLMs acquire social reasoning abilities, bridging AI interpretability with cognitive science. Our results have implications for enhancing model alignment, mitigating biases, and improving AI systems designed for human interaction.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理,仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。