arXiv Computation and Language

Bridging Linguistic Structure and Mechanistic Interpretability for Conceptual Interpretation in Language Models

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Language Has Two Parameters: Narrative-Induced Semantic Plasticity and Phase-Sensitive Interpretation

The paper argues that language operates with two parameters: amplitude, which measures how often words co‑occur, and phase, a signed relational factor that determines how co‑activated meanings combine and can reverse a meaning’s contribution. Unlike amplitude, phase is not captured by standard word embeddings or transformer attention weights and is indexed to individuals and dyadic interactions. The authors propose six empirical predictions to test phase’s role and suggest that future language models should incorporate agent‑indexed, phase‑bearing semantic states.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

The Imperfective Paradox Is Not Necessarily in Large Language Models: A Benchmark Failure Before a Model Failure

The paper critiques a recent NLI benchmark that tests the imperfective paradox, arguing that the benchmark suffers from conceptual and evaluation mis-specifications, notably Aspectual Reduction and a lack of strict NLI standards. The authors re-evaluate the benchmark, identify mis-specifications, and construct lexically matched minimal pairs to control for lexical variation. Their experiments reveal that models often exhibit a Sufficiency Bias, accept simple‑past hypotheses without affirming culmination, and that prompting interventions shift label decisions without improving true semantic understanding, highlighting additional failure modes such as compositional aspectual classification errors and surface‑form attraction.

By Kaiqiao Han, Yizhou Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

What Does Activation Steering Control? Attribution Across Answer Encodings and Output-Sensitive Subspaces

The paper investigates what aspects of language model behavior are controlled by activation steering. By introducing Cross‑Encoding Steering Evaluation, the authors show that steering effects often follow the extraction index of answer identifiers rather than the semantic content of the answers, especially at deeper layers. They also find that a low‑rank output‑sensitive component captures most of this effect, and that different datasets (NormBank, MNLI, SC101) exhibit varying preferences for extraction‑index versus semantic‑label following.

By Zhiwei Gao, Shaowen Peng, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki