Abstract
During extended wakefulness, mammalian neocortical networks experience localized periods of transient neuronal silence termed off-states. Here, we examine how analogous spatiotemporally concentrated disruptions affect sequential reasoning in autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs). Evaluating 250 paired derivations on the GSM8K benchmark across two 8B models (Qwen3-8B and LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct), we contrast clustered bursts of attention head masking against budget-matched diffuse i.i.d. dropout. Concentrated bursts induce substantial reasoning degradation: at onset parameter $\mathcal{B}=0.10$ (scheduling $\sim 5.7\%$ of vulnerable head-token volume), Qwen3-8B accuracy drops from $91.2\%$ under diffuse noise to $78.8\%$ under burst dropout ($\Delta = -12.4$ percentage points [pp], exact McNemar $p = 5.5 \times 10^{-6}$), while LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct drops from $84.0\%$ to $76.8\%$ ($\Delta = -7.2$ pp, $p = 0.0198$). Conversely, dispersing the identical cumulative budget uniformly across generation steps via stratified quintile matching yields substantially milder degradation (retaining $91.2\%$ in Qwen and $84.0\%$ in LLaMA). In an exploratory factorial dissociation ($N=100$), single-step dropout density is associated with an acute drop in a single schedule draw ($-10.0$ pp on Qwen, $p_{\text{holm}} = 0.0425$), while multi-token continuity exhibits an inconclusive compounding trend ($-7.0$ pp, $p_{\text{holm}} = 0.1892$). Error analysis reveals that Qwen failures reflect derivation errors within formatted responses (conditional accuracy drop of $-11.4$ pp), whereas in LLaMA $22.2\%$ of discordant losses lack a final answer format line (conditional gap narrows to $-5.0$ pp). These findings demonstrate that autoregressive reasoning chains are particularly vulnerable to concentrated structural disruptions, providing empirical benchmarks for fault tolerance in transformer architectures.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14209
