Interpreting Model Reasoning through Behavioral Counterfactuals
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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.
arXiv:2608. 16747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many areas of AI research, such as language model interpretability and chain of thought faithfulness, seek to explain model behaviors.
arXiv:2602. 20710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspecting Chain-of-Thought reasoning is among the most common means of understanding why an LLM produced its output.
arXiv:2606. 32038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When does training language models (LMs) to generate explanations of their predictions yield faithful introspection, rather than superficial imitation?
arXiv:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As chain of thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through verbalized reasoning.
The paper investigates how visual interventions—training‑free edits applied to multimodal large language models—affect hallucinations and prediction quality. By applying a visual‑residual edit across successive decoder layers and matching its RMS strength, the authors identify an Evidence Anchoring Boundary (EAB) where the intervention’s influence drops sharply; effects before the EAB are 13.78–26.10× larger than after it. They further compare counterfactual subtraction across different question types and introduce calibrated selective routing, which only alters predictions when calibration supports an intervention, improving attribute accuracy by 1.56–1.81 percentage points while avoiding the harms of universal subtraction.