Calibrating Interpretability Instruments Before Trusting Their Verdicts
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2607. 03598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person shares something with a language model, the model often answers the surface of the message rather than what the sender was doing by sending it: share a finished project and it critiques the code; share a raw late-night line and it runs a wellness check.
The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
A 0.6B language model consistently answers YES to 1,200 logical tests, yet its behavior shows no discrimination. Linear probes reveal the correct verdict with high AUC (0.96) and transfer to unseen structures, but a single scalar readout fails due to a saturated decision threshold offset by +4.6 σ. Adjusting this threshold restores behavior accuracy from 50 % to 81 % and improves higher‑scale models, demonstrating that miscalibrated readouts, not hidden knowledge loss, drive performance gaps.
arXiv:2606. 09046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Useful audits reveal not only how often a model fails, but also where its failures concentrate.
arXiv:2608. 03291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model (LLM) performance while also providing an observable interface to the model's reasoning process.
VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that transforms a text prompt into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any video frames are generated. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection, etc.) and records provenance‑carrying evidence for each action. The system maps these records to a three‑valued state—supported, contradicted, or unknown—providing traceable verdicts that can be used to refine generation models.