# The Mechanistic Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13796/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [In-context Learning and Induction Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11895/) (2022)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15004/) (2023)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Visual Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08669/) (2016)
- [The Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner: Interpreting Scenes, Words, and Sentences From Natural Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12584/) (2019)
- [Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14160/) (2023)
- [Retrieval Head Mechanistically Explains Long-Context Factuality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15574/) (2024)
- [Birth of a Transformer: A Memory Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00802/) (2023)
- [SimAlign: High Quality Word Alignments without Parallel Training Data using Static and Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08728/) (2020)
- [GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10103/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Video Models Start to Solve Chess, Maze, Sudoku, Mental Rotation, and Raven' Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05969/) (2025)
- [A Categorical Analysis of Large Language Models and Why LLMs Circumvent the Symbol Grounding Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09117/) (2025)
- [Input Pathways Shape Few-Shot, Not Zero-Shot, Binding in Tiny Transformers: A Fully-Enumerable Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04926/) (2026)
- [Emergent Language as an Approach to Conscious AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06380/) (2026)
- [Disentangling Statistical Preemption from Entrenchment in Language Models' Avoidance of Overgeneralization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01794/) (2026)
- [Metonymic Circuits for Abstract Concept Grounding in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06928/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Symbol grounding (Harnad, 1990) describes how symbols such as words acquire their meanings by connecting to real-world sensorimotor experiences. Recent work has shown preliminary evidence that grounding may emerge in (vision-)language models trained at scale without using explicit grounding objectives. Yet, the specific loci of this emergence and the mechanisms that drive it remain largely unexplored. To address this problem, we introduce a controlled evaluation framework that systematically traces how symbol grounding arises within the internal computations through mechanistic and causal analysis. Our findings show that grounding concentrates in middle-layer computations and is implemented through the aggregate mechanism, where attention heads aggregate the environmental ground to support the prediction of linguistic forms. This phenomenon replicates in multimodal dialogue and across architectures (Transformers and state-space models), but not in unidirectional LSTMs. Our results provide behavioral and mechanistic evidence that symbol grounding can emerge in language models, with practical implications for predicting and potentially controlling the reliability of generation.