mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information

arXiv 2502.14258 ↗First posted 20 Feb 2025cs.CL cs.AIcited by 15

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Abstract (arXiv)

While the ability of language models to elicit facts has been widely investigated, how they handle temporally changing facts remains underexplored. We discover Temporal Heads, specific attention heads that primarily handle temporal knowledge, through circuit analysis. We confirm that these heads are present across multiple models, though their specific locations may vary, and their responses differ depending on the type of knowledge and its corresponding years. Disabling these heads degrades the model's ability to recall time-specific knowledge while maintaining its general capabilities without compromising time-invariant and question-answering performances. Moreover, the heads are activated not only numeric conditions ("In 2004") but also textual aliases ("In the year ..."), indicating that they encode a temporal dimension beyond simple numerical representation. Furthermore, we expand the potential of our findings by demonstrating how temporal knowledge can be edited by adjusting the values of these heads.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

Builds on

39 of 53 references.

References · 39

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
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  12. 2022Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformercited by 1,001
27 more
  1. 2022In-context Learning and Induction Headscited by 964
  2. 2019Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Prunedcited by 856
  3. 2023Progress measures for grokking via mechanistic interpretabilitycited by 839
  4. 2023Towards Automated Circuit Discovery for Mechanistic Interpretabilitycited by 724
  5. 2021Fast Model Editing at Scalecited by 498
  6. 2022Memory-Based Model Editing at Scalecited by 447
  7. 2021Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Basescited by 296
  8. 2022RealTime QA: What's the Answer Right Now?cited by 244
  9. 2019Negated and Misprimed Probes for Pretrained Language Models: Birds Can Talk, But Cannot Flycited by 243
  10. 2024Retrieval Head Mechanistically Explains Long-Context Factualitycited by 232
  11. 2023Linearity of Relation Decoding in Transformer Language Modelscited by 200
  12. 2025Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretabilitycited by 179
  13. 2021A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questionscited by 154
  14. 2024Have Faith in Faithfulness: Going Beyond Circuit Overlap When Finding Model Mechanismscited by 149
  15. 2021SituatedQA: Incorporating Extra-Linguistic Contexts into QAcited by 145
  16. 2022TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Modelscited by 119
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  19. 2024Improving Steering Vectors by Targeting Sparse Autoencoder Featurescited by 92
  20. 2024What does the Knowledge Neuron Thesis Have to do with Knowledge?cited by 49
  21. 2024Summing Up the Facts: Additive Mechanisms Behind Factual Recall in LLMscited by 42
  22. 2023Time is Encoded in the Weights of Finetuned Language Modelscited by 33
  23. 2023Carpe Diem: On the Evaluation of World Knowledge in Lifelong Language Modelscited by 18
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 9.

15 papers.

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  1. 2025TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questionscited by 15
  2. 2025Mitigating Hallucination in VideoLLMs via Temporal-Aware Activation Engineeringcited by 8
  3. 2025Thinking Sparks!: Emergent Attention Heads in Reasoning Models During Post Trainingcited by 8
  4. 2025Toward a Theory of Generalizability in LLM Mechanistic Interpretability Researchcited by 5
  5. 2025Start Making Sense(s): A Developmental Probe of Attention Specialization Using Lexical Ambiguitycited by 3
  6. 2026Time Travel Engine: A Shared Latent Chronological Manifold Enables Historical Navigation in Large Language Modelscited by 2
  7. 2025ASGuard: Activation-Scaling Guard to Mitigate Targeted Jailbreaking Attackcited by 1
  8. 2026The Geometry of Forgetting: Temporal Knowledge Drift as an Independent Axis in LLM Representationscited by 1
  9. 2026PRISM Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answerscited by 1
  10. 2026Do Language Models Consistently Encode the Current Year?cited by 1
  11. 2026Temporal Dependencies in In-Context Learning: The Role of Induction Headscited by 0
  12. 2026Revealing Algorithmic Deductive Circuits for Logical Reasoningcited by 0
3 more
  1. 2026Can LLMs Be Constrained to the Past? Improving Knowledge Cutoff through Recall-Based Promptingcited by 0
  2. 2026Identifying Temporal Features within Transcoders for Time Sensitive Factual Recallcited by 0
  3. 2026Specialists Learn Faster: Knowledge Organization in Pre-training Shapes Knowledge Update Efficiencycited by 0