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Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Despite rapid adoption and deployment of large language models (LLMs), the internal computations of these models remain opaque and poorly understood. In this work, we seek to understand how high-level human-interpretable features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Wes Gurnee , Neel Nanda , Matthew Pauly , Katherine Harvey , Dmitrii Troitskii , Dimitris Bertsimas

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong linguistic performance, yet their internal mechanisms for producing these predictions remain unclear. We investigate the hypothesis that LLMs encode representations of linguistic constraint…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Hardy , Sebastian Padó

In language processing, training data with extremely large variance may lead to difficulty in the language model's convergence. It is difficult for the network parameters to adapt sentences with largely varied semantics or grammatical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Yunhao Yang , Zhaokun Xue

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across various applications, privacy and copyright concerns have heightened the need for more effective LLM unlearning techniques. Many existing unlearning methods aim to suppress…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Tomoya Yamashita , Akira Ito , Yuuki Yamanaka , Masanori Yamada , Takayuki Miura , Toshiki Shibahara

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yi Jing , Zijun Yao , Hongzhu Guo , Lingxu Ran , Xiaozhi Wang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Thibault Formal , Maxime Louis , Hervé Dejean , Stéphane Clinchant

Large Language Models (LLMs) are one of the most promising technologies for the next era of speech generation systems, due to their scalability and in-context learning capabilities. Nevertheless, they suffer from multiple stability issues…

As Large Language Models become integral to software development, with substantial portions of AI-suggested code entering production, understanding their internal correctness mechanisms becomes critical for safe deployment. We apply sparse…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Kriz Tahimic , Charibeth Cheng

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zirui He , Haiyan Zhao , Yiran Qiao , Fan Yang , Ali Payani , Jing Ma , Mengnan Du

In this work, we investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) adapt their internal representations when encountering inputs of increasing difficulty, quantified as the degree of out-of-distribution (OOD) shift. We reveal a consistent and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Mingyu Jin , Yutong Yin , Jingcheng Niu , Qingcheng Zeng , Wujiang Xu , Mengnan Du , Wei Cheng , Zhaoran Wang , Tianlong Chen , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yi Fang , Wenjie Wang , Mingfeng Xue , Boyi Deng , Fengli Xu , Dayiheng Liu , Fuli Feng

This study explores how bilingual language models develop complex internal representations. We employ sparse autoencoders to analyze internal representations of bilingual language models with a focus on the effects of training steps,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Tatsuro Inaba , Go Kamoda , Kentaro Inui , Masaru Isonuma , Yusuke Miyao , Yohei Oseki , Benjamin Heinzerling , Yu Takagi

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Xuansheng Wu , Wenhao Yu , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

There has been a lot of interest in understanding what information is captured by hidden representations of language models (LMs). Typically, interpretation methods i) do not guarantee that the model actually uses the encoded information,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Nicola De Cao , Leon Schmid , Dieuwke Hupkes , Ivan Titov

As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Eli Sason , Darya Frolova , Boris Nazarov , Felix Goldberd

Large language models (LLMs) are able to generate grammatically well-formed text, but how do they encode their syntactic knowledge internally? While prior work has focused largely on binary grammatical contrasts, in this work, we study the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Alina Klerings , Jannik Brinkmann , Daniel Ruffinelli , Simone Ponzetto

We present a unified framework for Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning that integrates Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning. By analyzing the gradient of a composite objective combining trajectory-level KL divergence with task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Yingru Li , Ziniu Li , Jiacai Liu