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Semantic text classification requires the understanding of the contextual significance of specific tokens rather than surface-level patterns or keywords (as in rule-based or statistical text classification), making large language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Adit Krishnan , Chu Wang , Chris Kong

Personality manipulation in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly applied in customer service and agentic scenarios, yet its mechanisms and trade-offs remain unclear. We present a systematic study of personality control using the Big…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Gunmay Handa , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama , Philip Treleaven

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zifeng Cheng , Jinwei Gan , Zhiwei Jiang , Cong Wang , Yafeng Yin , Xiang Luo , Yuchen Fu , Qing Gu

To truly understand vision models, we must not only interpret their learned features but also validate these interpretations through controlled experiments. While earlier work offers either rich semantics or direct control, few post-hoc…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Wei-Lun Chao , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

Many current state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendations are based on transformer architectures. Interpretation and explanation of such black box models is an important research question, as a better understanding of their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Anton Klenitskiy , Konstantin Polev , Daria Denisova , Alexey Vasilev , Dmitry Simakov , Gleb Gusev

Large Language Models (LLMs), characterized by being trained on broad amounts of data in a self-supervised manner, have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks. Indeed, their generative abilities have aroused interest on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Jorge García-Carrasco , Alejandro Maté , Juan Trujillo

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

We present a method for extracting \emph{monosemantic} neurons, defined as latent dimensions that align with coherent and interpretable concepts, from user and item embeddings in recommender systems. Our approach employs a Sparse…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Dor Arviv , Yehonatan Elisha , Oren Barkan , Noam Koenigstein

Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aleksandar Makelov , George Lange , Neel Nanda

Large language models (LLMs) tend to verbalize confidence scores that are largely detached from their actual accuracy, yet the geometric relationship governing this behavior remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Miranda Muqing Miao , Lyle Ungar

In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Can Demircan , Tankred Saanum , Akshay K. Jagadish , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Javier Ferrando , Enrique Lopez-Cuena , Pablo Agustin Martin-Torres , Daniel Hinjos , Anna Arias-Duart , Dario Garcia-Gasulla

What latent features are encoded in language model (LM) representations? Recent work on training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle interpretable features in LM representations has shown significant promise. However, evaluating the…

A common goal of mechanistic interpretability is to decompose the activations of neural networks into features: interpretable properties of the input computed by the model. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for finding these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Patrick Leask , Bart Bussmann , Michael Pearce , Joseph Bloom , Curt Tigges , Noura Al Moubayed , Lee Sharkey , Neel Nanda

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jifeng Song , Kai Huang , Xiangyu Yin , Boyuan Yang , Wei Gao

Transformer networks, particularly those achieving performance comparable to GPT models, are well known for their robust feature extraction abilities. However, the nature of these extracted features and their alignment with human-engineered…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tanya Chowdhury , Atharva Nijasure , James Allan

Preference learning in large language models relies on reward models as proxies for human judgment. However, these models frequently exhibit preference instability, producing contradictory preference assignments in response to subtle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shunchang Liu , Xin Chen , Belen Martin Urcelay , Francesco Croce

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien

Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging field probing the inner workings of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Pierre Beckmann , Matthieu Queloz

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs), have transformed natural language processing by improving generative capabilities. However, detecting biases embedded within these models remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Suvendu Mohanty