What drives the emergence of symbolic mechanisms in large language models?

Computer Science > Computation and Language

[Submitted on 9 Nov 2026]

Title:What drives the emergence of symbolic mechanisms in large language models?

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Recent work has identified a set of emergent symbolic mechanisms that support abstract reasoning in large language models, but it remains unclear what factors drive the emergence of these mechanisms. To address this question, we trained neural networks from scratch on abstract sequence tasks, varying both architectural and data distributional factors, and investigated the effects of these factors on the emergence of symbolic mechanisms. Using representational, attentional, and causal mediation analyses, we first confirmed that transformer-based language models trained from scratch on our task developed symbolic mechanisms. We then found that, across multiple axes of data diversity, greater diversity produced stronger symbolic signatures. Surprisingly, the same signatures emerged in modified transformer architectures and even multilayer perceptrons, indicating that architectural inductive biases are not necessary for the development of symbolic mechanisms. We also observed consistent patterns in an entity-attribute binding task. Together, these findings identify data diversity, not architecture, as the primary driver of emergent symbolic computation in neural networks.

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