Identifying Temporal Features within Transcoders for Time Sensitive Factual Recall
TL;DR
This work identifies three node categories (common temporal, common to the year, and chrono-semantic) which interact to generate a temporal filter during factual recall and provides the first feature-level map of temporal recall by isolating individual MLP features via transcoder circuit tracing.
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from temporal misalignment, often due to the contradictory nature of their training corpora. While current mitigation strategies rely on computationally expensive fine-tuning or context-heavy retrieval augmented generation (RAG), the internal mechanisms governing time-sensitive recall remain under-explored. Unlike prior studies that identify temporal components such as attention heads and MLP layers, we provide the first feature-level map of temporal recall by isolating individual MLP features via transcoder circuit tracing. We identify three node categories (common temporal, common to the year, and chrono-semantic) which interact to generate a temporal filter during factual recall. By analysing Gemma 2 2B, LLaMA 3.2 1B, and Qwen3-4B, we show that these features do not follow a simple linear pipeline but represent time through a parallel and mixed syntactic-semantic interplay across layers. We additionally discover a class of higher-layer temporal components invisible to existing EAP-IG methods, establishing transcoders as a more complete lens for temporal interpretability in time-sensitive factual recall. These findings present MLP components for potential targeted interventions in time-sensitive factual recall
