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arXiv AI By Fangyi Zhu, Ajay Subramanian, Allison Constant, Camille Wang, Ravish Gupta, Corey J. Keller

Interpretable Symptom Vectors for Depression in a Large Language Model

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The study investigates how a large language model, Gemma-3-27B-PT, internally represents depressive symptoms. By applying mechanistic interpretability methods to the model’s residual stream, researchers found that symptom groups are geometrically distinct at layer 21, and that projected symptom vectors align with clinician-annotated rankings across mood, somatic, and suicidality dimensions. Additionally, a single depression vector at this layer can differentiate depressive from non-depressive text with an AUC of 0.789, suggesting a potential emotional valence gate for symptom projection.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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