arXiv Machine Learning

Evidence-Type Competition: When Can Interventional Data Teach Language Models Causal Direction?

arXiv:2607. 29484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interventional data is widely regarded as the gold standard for teaching models causal reasoning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

arXiv:2606. 15779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction.

By Van Thong Huynh, Hong Hai Nguyen, Thuy Pham, Trong Nghia Nguyen, Soo-Hyung Kim
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Resist and Update: Counterfactual Report Coordinates for Incentive-Compatible LLMs

Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility (IC) and present a method for learning and certifying counterfactual report mediators that hold a model's reports to a causal contract: invariant to forbidden influences (pressure, prestige, restyling) and responsive to licensed ones (genuine evidence).

arXiv AI
Jul 21

How Does Alignment Tuning Shape Representations of Sycophancy and Related Cue-Induced Biases in LLMs?

arXiv:2607. 18114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer.

By Prakhar Gupta, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Florent Draye, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

How Does Alignment Tuning Shape Representations of Sycophancy and Related Cue-Induced Biases in LLMs?

Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer. We study where this susceptibility, spanning sycophancy and related cue-induced biases, lives inside the model.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Pattern Selectivity is Not Task-Causal Structure: A Cross-Architecture Mechanistic Study of Composed-Task Circuits in 1B-Class Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.

By Yongzhong Xu