English

Superscopes: Amplifying Internal Feature Representations for Language Model Interpretation

Computation and Language 2025-03-11 v2 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Understanding and interpreting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains an open challenge. Patchscopes introduced a method for probing internal activations by patching them into new prompts, prompting models to self-explain their hidden representations. We introduce Superscopes, a technique that systematically amplifies superposed features in MLP outputs (multilayer perceptron) and hidden states before patching them into new contexts. Inspired by the "features as directions" perspective and the Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) approach from diffusion models, Superscopes amplifies weak but meaningful features, enabling the interpretation of internal representations that previous methods failed to explain-all without requiring additional training. This approach provides new insights into how LLMs build context and represent complex concepts, further advancing mechanistic interpretability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.02078,
  title  = {Superscopes: Amplifying Internal Feature Representations for Language Model Interpretation},
  author = {Jonathan Jacobi and Gal Niv},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02078},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:05:32.312Z