Related papers: Truth Neurons
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a variety of tasks, but their increasing autonomy in real-world applications raises concerns about their trustworthiness. While hallucinations-unintentional…
Why do language models trained on contradictory data prefer correct answers? In controlled experiments with small transformers (3.5M--86M parameters), we show that this preference tracks the compressibility structure of errors rather than…
How do language models retrieve entity-specific facts from their parameters? We investigate this question by searching for sparse, entity-selective MLP neurons - which we call entity cells, by analogy to the "grandmother cell" hypothesis in…
Neural models for response generation produce responses that are semantically plausible but not necessarily factually consistent with facts describing the speaker's persona. These models are trained with fully supervised learning where the…
Language models (LMs) can exhibit human-like behaviour, but it is unclear how to describe this behaviour without undue anthropomorphism. We formalise a behaviourist view of LM character traits: qualities such as truthfulness, sycophancy, or…
Reasoning language models have set state-of-the-art (SOTA) records on many challenging benchmarks, enabled by multi-step reasoning induced using reinforcement learning. However, like previous language models, reasoning models are prone to…
While existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) measure deception rates, the underlying conditions that give rise to deceptive behavior are poorly understood. We investigate this question using a novel dataset of realistic moral…
Despite the great success of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, they suffer from generating hallucinations. We introduce Truth Forest, a method that enhances truthfulness in LLMs by uncovering hidden truth representations using…
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to possess impressive capabilities, while also raising crucial concerns about the faithfulness of their responses. A primary issue arising in this context is the management of (un)answerable…
Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to be unreliable in the factuality of their answers. To address this problem, NLP researchers have proposed a range of techniques to estimate LLM's confidence over facts. However, due to the lack of a…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
We reassess the Knowledge Neuron (KN) Thesis: an interpretation of the mechanism underlying the ability of large language models to recall facts from a training corpus. This nascent thesis proposes that facts are recalled from the training…
Large language models (LLMs) often benefit from intermediate steps of reasoning to generate answers to complex problems. When these intermediate steps of reasoning are used to monitor the activity of the model, it is essential that this…
There have been many studies on analyzing self-supervised speech Transformers, in particular, with layer-wise analysis. It is, however, desirable to have an approach that can pinpoint exactly a subset of neurons that is responsible for a…
Despite the increasing effectiveness of language models, their reasoning capabilities remain underdeveloped. In particular, causal reasoning through counterfactual question answering is lacking. This work aims to bridge this gap. We first…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque. In this paper, we introduce a simple, lightweight, and broadly applicable method with a focus on…
Language models can be persuaded to abandon factual knowledge. This vulnerability is central to AI safety, but its internal mechanism remains poorly understood. We uncover a compact causal mechanism for persuasion-induced factual errors. A…
While feed-forward neurons in pre-trained language models (PLMs) can encode knowledge, past research targeted a small subset of neurons that heavily influence outputs. This leaves the broader role of neuron activations unclear, limiting…
The veracity of a factoid is largely independent of the language it is written in. However, language models are inconsistent in their ability to answer the same factual question across languages. This raises questions about how LLMs…
Small language models (SLMs) have been increasingly deployed in edge devices and other resource-constrained settings. However, these models make confident mispredictions and produce unstable output, making them risky for factual and…