# Do Syntax Heads Influence Model Behavior?

> Source: <https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19231>
> Published: 2026-10-15 04:00:00+00:00

# Computer Science > Computation and Language

  [Submitted on 13 Oct 2026]

# Title:Do Syntax Heads Influence Model Behavior?

[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.19231)

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Abstract:Transformer language models develop attention heads that specialize in syntactic relations, for example, attending from verbs to their subjects. Do these heads play a causal role in the model's syntactic predictions? Evidence for such a role is mixed to negative: even when we force these heads to attend to a distractor noun other than the subject, the model's syntactic predictions are still more consistent with the subject than with the distractor. Interventions on specialized syntax heads had a significantly stronger effect on syntactic predictions than interventions on random heads, but only in one of the two measures we propose.
    

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