@inproceedings{park-etal-2025-time,
title = "Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information",
author = "Park, Yein and
Yoon, Chanwoong and
Park, Jungwoo and
Jeong, Minbyul and
Kang, Jaewoo",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.812/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.812",
pages = "16616--16643",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "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."
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<abstract>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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information
%A Park, Yein
%A Yoon, Chanwoong
%A Park, Jungwoo
%A Jeong, Minbyul
%A Kang, Jaewoo
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F park-etal-2025-time
%X 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.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.812
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.812/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.812
%P 16616-16643
Markdown (Informal)
[Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.812/) (Park et al., ACL 2025)
ACL