arXiv:2601. 09624v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine unlearning is becoming essential for building trustworthy and compliant language models.
arXiv:2606. 16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task.
The paper investigates mechanistic interpretability, focusing on how automated circuit discovery is evaluated. It shows that the commonly used faithfulness objective can favor circuits that reproduce a model’s behavior poorly, creating an objective-level recovery gap. Experiments on four human-reference tasks and InterpBench reveal that many discovery methods misrank candidate circuits, and that restoring excluded signals can correct most of these misrankings without altering the circuits’ behavior.
arXiv:2609.36813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general capabilities that mechanistic interpretability has attributed to sparse computational circuits. How...
arXiv:2606. 24026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made substantial progress in automatically localizing circuits, but explaining what localized components do remains labor-intensive and difficult to standardize.
arXiv:2605. 28860v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities.
arXiv:2608. 05732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge for AI alignment.
arXiv:2606. 16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior.
arXiv:2609.32964v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models (LMs) often hallucinate by committing to confident answers rather than abstaining, even when they do not have enough information to...
arXiv:2609.35890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse-autoencoder decomposability and concentrated feature attribution are increasingly treated as evidence that a model's computation is easier to re...
The paper introduces Concept-Targeted Attribution (CTA), a method that trains attribution graphs to explain the emergence of internal concept representations in language models, rather than just the final token prediction. CTA produces probe-specific circuits that reveal which internal computations drive a linear probe’s accuracy, and cross-layer transcoders demonstrate that these graphs contain predictive structure across multiple concept categories. Causal ablations show that probe-targeted and logit-targeted graphs capture distinct mechanisms, with probe-relevant features affecting internal concept scores and logit-relevant features altering generated tokens.
arXiv:2603. 13761v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Curriculum learning--ordering training examples in a sequence to aid machine learning--takes inspiration from human learning, but has not gained widespread acceptance.
The study investigates how post‑training of large autoregressive language models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) affects their internal computation. Across two 7B ARM‑MDM families and four diagnostic tasks, the authors find that MDMs retain much of the ARM’s high‑attribution pathways on prefix‑dominant tasks, but reorganize computation toward earlier layers on globally constrained tasks. Component‑level probes reveal that ARMs depend on sharply specialized components, whereas MDMs show weaker specialization and more diffuse output‑space alignment.