arXiv Machine Learning By Shawn Im, James Oldfield, Adel Bibi, Sharon Li

Interpreting Model Reasoning through Behavioral Counterfactuals

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces a method for analyzing how interventions in a prompt affect a language model’s reasoning by using behavioral counterfactuals. It trains a module to edit the residual stream so that the next-token distributions for a fixed response match between a source and a counterfactual prompt, outperforming standard activation reconstruction. The resulting attribution maps and visualizations help identify causally important locations for counterfactual recovery and guide hypothesis testing with activation patching, as demonstrated in a case study on Gemma-4-E4B-it and DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B.

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arXiv AI
Oct 16

Human Interventions as Labels: Localizing, Steering, and (Sometimes) Editing the Computations Behind LLM Agent Failures

The paper treats human interventions during LLM agent failures as labels that pinpoint the internal computation that went wrong, rather than merely training data. In a controlled environment, the authors analyze one failure type—over‑asking a clarifying question when the request is already clear—using rule‑based overseer labels validated by blind human judgment. They find that the decision to ask versus act can be causally localized across several models, that over‑asking exhibits distinct mechanistic signatures, and that steering or weight consolidation can mitigate the issue, though outcomes vary by model family.

By Cesare Zavattari, Alessandro Tommasi, Giuseppe Prencipe