Arithmetic in the Wild: Llama uses Standard Addition to Reason About Cyclic Concepts

Sheridan Feucht, Tal Haklay, Usha Bhalla, Daniel Wurgaft, Can Rager, Jack Merullo, Thomas McGrath, Raphaël Sarfati, Owen Lewis, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Thomas Fel, Atticus Geiger

Conference On Language Models 3 pre-proceedings (COLM 2026) Conference

BibTeX download is not available in the pre-proceeding

Does structure in representations imply structure in computation? We study how Llama-3.1-8B reasons over cyclic concepts (e.g., what month is three months after November?). Even though Llama-3.1-8B has circular representations for these concepts, we find that instead of directly computing modular addition in the period of the cyclic concept (e.g., 12 for months), the model re-uses a generic addition mechanism across tasks that operates independently of concept-specific geometry. First, it computes the sum of its two inputs using non-modular addition (three + November=14). Then, it maps back to cyclic concept space (14->February). We show that Llama-3.1-8B uses task-agnostic Fourier features to compute these sums—in fact, these features have periods that respect standard base-10 addition, e.g., 2, 5, and 10, rather than the cyclic concept period (e.g., 12). Furthermore, we identify a sparse, reusable set of 28 MLP neurons (approximately 0.2% of the MLP at layer 18) that can be partitioned into disjoint clusters that each compute the sum for a Fourier feature with a different period. Our work highlights how an interplay between causal abstraction and feature geometry can deepen our mechanistic understanding of LMs.