Related papers: Interpretability without actionability: mechanisti…

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim for ante-hoc interpretability by learning a bottleneck layer that predicts interpretable concepts before the decision. State-of-the-art approaches typically select which concepts to learn via human…

Standard Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) excel at discovering a dictionary of a model's learned features, offering a powerful observational lens. However, the ambiguous and ungrounded nature of these features makes them unreliable instruments…

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) aims to reverse-engineer model behaviors by identifying functional sub-networks. Yet, the scientific validity of these findings depends on their stability. In this work, we argue that circuit discovery is…

Multimodal AI systems have achieved remarkable performance across a broad range of real-world tasks, yet the mechanisms underlying visual-language reasoning remain surprisingly poorly understood. We report three findings that challenge…

Driver observation models are rarely deployed under perfect conditions. In practice, illumination, camera placement and type differ from the ones present during training and unforeseen behaviours may occur at any time. While observing the…

Activation steering is a practical post-training model alignment technique to enhance the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to deploying a model as a service, developers can steer a pre-trained model toward specific behavioral…

Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…

Neural networks are growing more capable on their own, but we do not understand their neural mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms' decision-making processes, or mechanistic interpretability, enables (1) accountability and control in…

Binary code similarity detection is a core task in reverse engineering. It supports malware analysis and vulnerability discovery by identifying semantically similar code in different contexts. Modern methods have progressed from manually…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to interpret foundation models, but their role as an actionable intervention space remains less understood, especially in vision. We study whether sparse visual features can be used not only…

We demonstrate how AI agents can coordinate to deceive oversight systems using automated interpretability of neural networks. Using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as our experimental framework, we show that language models (Llama, DeepSeek R1,…

Language confusion -- where large language models (LLMs) generate unintended languages against the user's need -- remains a critical challenge, especially for English-centric models. We present the first mechanistic interpretability (MI)…

Methods for model explainability have become increasingly critical for testing the fairness and soundness of deep learning. Concept-based interpretability techniques, which use a small set of human-interpretable concept exemplars in order…

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand model behaviors in terms of specific, interpretable features, often hypothesized to manifest as low-dimensional subspaces of activations. Specifically, recent studies have explored subspace…

Mechanistic interpretability improves the safety, reliability, and robustness of large AI models. This study examined individual attention heads in vision transformers (ViTs) fine tuned on distorted 2D spectrogram images containing non…

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…

One of the main challenges in mechanistic interpretability is circuit discovery, determining which parts of a model perform a given task. We build on the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (MIB) and propose three key improvements to…

This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are…

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering…