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.
By Naiyu Yin, Dennis Wei, Tian Gao, Amit Dhurandhar, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Yue Yu
arXiv:2601. 22594v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986).
By Aryaman Arora, Zhengxuan Wu, Jacob Steinhardt, Sarah Schwettmann
arXiv:2606. 26620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for decomposing superposed language model representations into sparse and interpretable features.
By XinYang He, Wei Wang, Bing Zhao, Xuan Ren, WenBo Li, WeiXu Qiao, Hu Wei, Lin Qu
arXiv:2607. 07128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models perform a wide range of tasks at varying levels of abstraction with the capacity to flexibly infer tasks from context, execute multiple tasks simultaneously, and select among competing tasks.
By Maximilian S. Ernst (Max Planck School of Cognition, Center for Lifespan Psychology Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Machine Learning Group Technische Universit\"at Berlin), Lorenz Linhardt (Machine Learning Group Technische Universit\"at Berlin, Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data), Aaron Peikert (Center for Lifespan Psychology Max Planck Institute for Human Development), Oliver Eberle (Machine Learning Group Technische Universit\"at Berlin, Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data)
arXiv:2606. 15796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits.
By Artyom Mazur, Nina Konovalova, Aibek Alanov
arXiv:2606. 08454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering provides a lightweight inference-time mechanism for controlling large language models (LLMs) by modifying their internal activation vectors toward desired behaviors.
By Tuc Nguyen, Thai Le
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2606. 01923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit "contextual disregard" when faced with input evidence that conflicts with their internal parametric memory, leading to persistent factual hallucinations.
By Mingkuan Zhao, Yide Gao, Wentao Hu, Suquan Chen, Tianchen Huang, Zhenhua An, Zetao Chang, Xiayu Sun, Yuheng Min
The paper investigates how steering vectors influence large language models (LLMs) by conducting a mechanistic case study on refusal behavior. Using a multi-token activation patching framework, the authors find that steering methods primarily target the OV circuit of the attention mechanism, largely ignoring the QK circuit, and that these circuits are functionally interchangeable across different steering approaches. The study also shows that steering vectors can be sparsified by 85–96% with minimal performance loss and that key dimensions are consistently identified across methods.
By Stephen Cheng, Sarah Wiegreffe, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2506.12576v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can enable inference-time topic steering by modifying latent feature activations, but existing steering methods often fa...
By Ananya Joshi, Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman
arXiv:2603. 09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective netlist representations is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of labeled datasets, as real designs are protected by Intellectual Property (IP) and costly to annotate.
By Siyang Cai, Cangyuan Li, Haoyu Gao, Kun Wang, Yinhe Han, Ying Wang
arXiv:2606. 11722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior.
By Sida Liu, Feijiang Han