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Understanding the internal circuits that language models use to solve tasks remains a central challenge in mechanistic interpretability. A crucial part of finding circuits is understanding why each attention head attends where it does. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Gabriel Franco , Lucas M. Tassis , Azalea Rohr , Mark Crovella

Mechanistic interpretability work attempts to reverse engineer the learned algorithms present inside neural networks. One focus of this work has been to discover 'circuits' -- subgraphs of the full model that explain behaviour on specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Joseph Miller , Bilal Chughtai , William Saunders

Over time, software systems have reached a level of complexity that makes it difficult for their developers and users to explain particular decisions made by them. In this paper, we focus on the explainability of component-based systems for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Dennis Schiese , Aleksandr Perevalov , Andreas Both

Can language models (LMs) learn to faithfully describe their internal computations? Are they better able to describe themselves than other models? We study the extent to which LMs' privileged access to their own internals can be leveraged…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Belinda Z. Li , Zifan Carl Guo , Vincent Huang , Jacob Steinhardt , Jacob Andreas

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques such as \textit{sparse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Aryaman Arora , Zhengxuan Wu , Jacob Steinhardt , Sarah Schwettmann

Recent large language models have demonstrated relevant capabilities in solving problems that require logical reasoning; however, the corresponding internal mechanisms remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that a small language…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Davide Maltoni , Matteo Ferrara

Finding human-understandable circuits in language models is a central goal of the field of mechanistic interpretability. We train models to have more understandable circuits by constraining most of their weights to be zeros, so that each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Leo Gao , Achyuta Rajaram , Jacob Coxon , Soham V. Govande , Bowen Baker , Dan Mossing

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Alihan Hüyük , Xinnuo Xu , Jacqueline Maasch , Aditya V. Nori , Javier González

Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. When students encounter discrepancies between the actual and expected behavior of a system, they revise their models to include the newly…

Physics Education · Physics 2022-07-06 Laura Ríos , Benjamin Pollard , Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer , H. J. Lewandowski

Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Allen Nie , Erin D. Bennett , Noah D. Goodman

Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Harshwardhan Fartale , Ashish Kattamuri , Rahul Raja , Arpita Vats , Ishita Prasad , Akshata Kishore Moharir

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the size of LLMs is steadily increasing, hindering their application on computationally constrained environments. On the other hand,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Jorge García-Carrasco , Alejandro Maté , Juan Trujillo

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) models aim at answering a question with its relevant paragraph and previous question-answer pairs that occurred during conversation multiple times. To apply such models to a real-world scenario,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Soyeong Jeong , Jinheon Baek , Sung Ju Hwang , Jong C. Park

While large language models (LLMs) are proficient at question-answering (QA), it is not always clear how (or even if) an answer follows from their latent "beliefs". This lack of interpretability is a growing impediment to widespread use of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Nora Kassner , Oyvind Tafjord , Ashish Sabharwal , Kyle Richardson , Hinrich Schuetze , Peter Clark

We formulate sequence to sequence transduction as a noisy channel decoding problem and use recurrent neural networks to parameterise the source and channel models. Unlike direct models which can suffer from explaining-away effects during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Lei Yu , Phil Blunsom , Chris Dyer , Edward Grefenstette , Tomas Kocisky

We propose a large language model explainability technique for obtaining faithful natural language explanations by grounding the explanations in a reasoning process. When converted to a sequence of tokens, the outputs of the reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Vojtech Cahlik , Rodrigo Alves , Pavel Kordik

Transformer language models are state of the art in a multitude of NLP tasks. Despite these successes, their opaqueness remains problematic. Recent methods aiming to provide interpretability and explainability to black-box models primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Felix Friedrich , Patrick Schramowski , Christopher Tauchmann , Kristian Kersting

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities, enabling concise, context-aware answers in question answering (QA) tasks. The lack of transparency in complex LLMs has inspired extensive research aimed at developing methods to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yangyi Li , Mengdi Huai

To assist non-specialists in formulating database queries, multiple frameworks that automatically infer queries from a set of examples have been proposed. While highly useful, a shortcoming of the approach is that if users can only provide…

Databases · Computer Science 2016-05-17 Daniel Deutch , Amir Gilad

Generating accurate circuit schematics from high-level natural language descriptions remains a persistent challenge in electronic design automation (EDA), as large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate components, violate strict…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Khandakar Shakib Al Hasan , Syed Rifat Raiyan , Hasin Mahtab Alvee , Wahid Sadik