arXiv:2608. 12334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the impressive multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models, the latent dynamics dictating language selection remain poorly understood.
By Arnav Srivastav
arXiv:2607. 29484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interventional data is widely regarded as the gold standard for teaching models causal reasoning.
By Xining Xun
arXiv:2605. 09692v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous language agents increasingly expose traces, memories, plans and constraints, but existing evaluations rarely test whether these state variables are bound to final actions.
By Xiao Jia
arXiv:2608. 03842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model fails on surface-perturbed input (typos, OCR noise, homophones), "which layer is responsible" has three natural operationalizations: where representations diverge most (sensitivity), where restoring clean activations recovers the prediction (causality), and where a small adapter can repair the damage (compensatory capacity) - and we show these three layer maps dissociate.
By Nathan Labiosa, David Buff, Ena Nayak, Erica Donno
arXiv:2606. 15733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged.
By Zhenyu Yu
arXiv:2606. 08292v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic studies often assign a component a role when removing it damages a behavior, its activation linearly encodes task information, and restoring that activation repairs the damage.
By Philip Quirke
arXiv:2608. 06578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier language models are trained using distinct data, objectives, and safety pipelines.
By Ali Jalal-Kamali
arXiv:2608. 09696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified.
By Kevin Murphy
Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified. Experiments are expensive, so the central problem is \emph{data efficiency}.
arXiv:2606. 01060v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference alignment has substantially improved the observable behavior of large language models, yet it remains unclear what alignment changes internally.
By Partha Pratim Saha, Samarth Raina, Mayur Parvatikar, Amit Dhanda, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amitava Das
arXiv:2608. 15687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of a language model to change its answer to match a user's stated belief, is a common alignment failure.
By Kareem Hassani, Chaymaa Abbas, Lama Mawlawi, Mariette Awad
arXiv:2608. 15772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model refuses to answer a prompt, it is unclear whether the correct answer is erased from its internal representations, or merely suppressed at the output layer.
By Yiqi Liu, Yang Wang, Songxin Wang, Chenghao Xiao, Chenghua Lin