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Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns. We study this question through the…
We investigate the structure of Large Language Model (LLM) embedding spaces using mathematical concepts, particularly linear algebra and the Hamiltonian formalism, drawing inspiration from analogies with quantum mechanical systems.…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to model human social behavior, with recent research exploring their ability to simulate social dynamics. Here, we test whether LLMs mirror human behavior in social dilemmas, where…
In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual information. Analogous to human episodic memory, where the retrieval of specific events is enabled by…
Predicting problem-difficulty in large language models (LLMs) refers to estimating how difficult a task is according to the model itself, typically by training linear probes on its internal representations. In this work, we study the…
The geometric structure of latent representations in large language models (LLMs) is an active area of research, driven in part by its implications for model transparency and AI safety. Existing literature has focused mainly on general…
In-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including learning to make reward-maximizing choices in simple bandit tasks. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decision-making agents, it is…
How do the latent spaces used by independently-trained LLMs relate to one another? We study the nearest neighbor relationships induced by activations at different layers of 24 open-weight LLMs, and find that they 1) tend to vary from layer…
We deploy the methods of controlled psycholinguistic experimentation to shed light on the extent to which the behavior of neural network language models reflects incremental representations of syntactic state. To do so, we examine model…
Do large language models (LLMs) exhibit sociodemographic biases, even when they decline to respond? To bypass their refusal to "speak," we study this research question by probing contextualized embeddings and exploring whether this bias is…
Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art results across many natural language tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret. In this work, we extract, process, and visualize latent state geometries in…
When large language models (LLMs) are asked to perform certain tasks, how can we be sure that their learned representations align with reality? We propose a domain-agnostic framework for systematically evaluating distribution shifts in LLMs…
The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) raise the possibility that synthetic agents can serve as substitutes for real participants in human-subject research. To evaluate this claim, prior research has largely focused on…
Language models draw on two knowledge sources: facts baked into weights (parametric memory, PM) and information in context (working memory, WM). We study two mechanistically distinct failure modes--conflict, when PM and WM disagree and…
Large language models (LLMs) have complicated internal dynamics, but induce representations of words and phrases whose geometry we can study. Human language processing is also opaque, but neural response measurements can provide (noisy)…
Large language models have achieved remarkable success in general language understanding tasks. However, as a family of generative methods with the objective of next token prediction, the semantic evolution with the depth of these models…
Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment…
Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…
As the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) spreads across various industries, there are increasing concerns about the potential for their misuse, especially in sensitive areas such as political discourse. Deliberately aligning LLMs…
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) encode various facts about the world at their pre-training phase as they are trained to predict the next or missing word in a sentence. There has a been an interest in quantifying and improving the amount…