# Relation Before Entity: Deferred Commitment in Language Model Factual Recall

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17537/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 small](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00593/) (2022)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [Dissecting Recall of Factual Associations in Auto-Regressive Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14767/) (2023)
- [Function Vectors in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15213/) (2023)
- [How to use and interpret activation patching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15255/) (2024)
- [Linearity of Relation Decoding in Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09124/) (2023)
- [Tracing Relational Knowledge Recall in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19934/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We ask whether relation-type information (e.g., capital-of) and entity-specific information (e.g., France to Paris) become causally active at the final-token position at the same depth during recall. Using four complementary causal diagnostics across four decoder-only models and eight prompt families, we find a robust temporal asymmetry: relation information becomes generation-controlling before entity information does. Relation onset precedes entity onset by 10-16 tested layers (31-44% of network depth) at threshold 0.4, with the ordering holding across all 16 model-threshold combinations for thresholds 0.2-0.5. Critically, entity information is not absent early: entity-token patching succeeds at 90-100% in early layers. Instead, entity commitment to generation is deferred: entity information is available at the entity-token position but becomes generation-controlling at the final token only after being routed there.