Related papers: Interpretability without actionability: mechanisti…
Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of machine learning models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…
Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has emerged as a vital approach to demystify the opaque decision-making of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing reviews primarily treat MI as an observational science, summarizing analytical…
The trade-off between accuracy and interpretability has long been a challenge in machine learning (ML). This tension is particularly significant for emerging interpretable-by-design methods, which aim to redesign ML algorithms for…
Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently encode factual and reasoning knowledge in their internal representations that is not faithfully reflected in their surface-level outputs -- a phenomenon known as \emph{latent knowledge}. Existing…
Recent work in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has enabled the identification and intervention of internal features in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, a persistent challenge lies in linking such internal features to the reliable…
Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…
Object hallucination critically undermines the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models, often stemming from a fundamental failure in cognitive introspection, where models blindly trust linguistic priors over specific visual…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…
Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying…
Mechanistic interpretability identifies internal circuits responsible for model behaviors, yet translating these findings into human-understandable explanations remains an open problem. We present a pipeline that bridges circuit-level…
Models based on human-understandable concepts have received extensive attention to improve model interpretability for trustworthy artificial intelligence in the field of medical image analysis. These methods can provide convincing…
Steering methods for language models (LMs) have gained traction as lightweight alternatives to fine-tuning, enabling targeted modifications to model activations. However, prior studies primarily report results on a few models, leaving…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…
Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…
Recent progress in multimodal foundation models has enabled Vision-Language Agents (VLAs) to decompose complex visual tasks into executable tool-based plans. While recent benchmarks have begun to evaluate iterative self-correction, its…
As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…
Activation steering presupposes that task-relevant behaviors correspond to linear directions in activation space -- directions that should both steer the model and be readable along the unembedding. Function vectors (FVs), extracted as mean…