arXiv:2606. 10703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested.
By Leonard Engmann, Christian Medeiros Adriano, Holger Giese
arXiv:2606. 27510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation patching is the primary tool in mechanistic interpretability.
By Sankaran Vaidyanathan, David Arbour, Aaron Mueller, Scott Niekum, David Jensen
arXiv:2606. 08275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When an LLM agent fails -- issues a refund it should not have, calls the wrong tool, leaks data -- existing tooling answers what happened (observability) or whether it passed (evaluation), but not which step caused the failure.
By Jaineet Shah
arXiv:2603. 01372v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of end-to-end neural networks by introducing a layer of concepts and predicting the class label from the concept predictions.
By Weixin Chen, Han Zhao
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:2607. 00267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of science is to produce valid explanations of complex systems: high-level causal accounts that faithfully reflect the behavior of lower-level mechanisms.
By Maxime M\'eloux, Tiago Pimentel, Fran\c{c}ois Portet, Maxime Peyrard
arXiv:2603. 05167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility.
By Avni Mittal, Rauno Arike
arXiv:2606. 13884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern decision systems increasingly rely on learned components whose outputs may be confident yet wrong, exposing downstream actions to costly errors.
By Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer, Rahul Suresh Babu
arXiv:2606. 05263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves reasoning and tool use, yet long-horizon language agents still learn unsupported evidence chains, belief drift, and shortcut actions that satisfy terminal checks.
By Renwei Meng
arXiv:2607. 12985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Sen Yang, Yuen-Hei Yeung
arXiv:2606. 20820v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Can we trust evaluation scores to capture an LLM's true real-world performance?
By Zhijian Zhou, Zesheng Ye, Zhaorun Chen, Bo Li, Feng Liu
arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.
By Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Ruochen Yang, Yingzhi He, Peng Zhang, Jiangxia Cao, Yusheng Huang, Guohong Mu, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Shuang Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou, Kun Gai