LLM Interpretability

LLM: Large Language Model

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57 papers in the last four weeks, up 73% on the four weeks before. 0.6% of all new papers.

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On Temporal Binding in Large Audio Language Models
Sep 28, 2026Paul Primus, Gerhard WidmerLLM Interpretability Audio Reasoning
Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria · LIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
When Do Model Internals Help? Exploring the Role of Representation Engineering in LLM Safety
Sep 28, 2026Tianyi Guan, Jianhui Chen, Liangming PanLanguage Model Safety Evaluation LLM Interpretability
State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University · School of Computer Science, Peking University
Who Gets a Token, and What Does It Carry? Unequal Name Support and Concept Access in Large Language Models
Sep 28, 2026Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Davood RafieiLLM Interpretability Language Model Bias Evaluation
Department of Computing Science University of Alberta
Faithful Activation Verbalization: Reducing Hallucinations in LLM Representation Interpretation
Sep 27, 2026Haiyan Zhao, Zirui Hei, Wei Shi +3LLM Hallucination Mitigation LLM Interpretability
New Jersey Institute of Technology · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Xi’an JiaoTong University +1
Hallucination Neurons and Where to Find Them: An Investigation into the existence of Hallucination Neurons
Sep 24, 2026Huseyin Cavus, Sebin Sabu, Joshua Spear +2LLM Interpretability Hallucination in Language Models
Trakya University, Edirne, Türkiye · DRIVE, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK
Grammatical "grandmother neurons" are rare in LLMs
Sep 24, 2026Linyang He, Nima MesgaraniLLM Interpretability
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University
Stream Recursion Model (SRM)
Sep 23, 2026Asael Sorensen, Charles Brock, David Chamberlain +3LLM Interpretability Mechanistic Interpretability
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA · Institute for Complex Additive Systems Analysis, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, NM, USA.
Math Reasoning in LLMs is Organized by Approach, Not Topic
Sep 22, 2026Sajad Goudarzi, Samaneh Zamanifard, Moloud Nasiri +1Mathematical Reasoning Benchmarks LLM Interpretability
Clemson University
Capable yet Parsimonious: Extracting and Characterizing Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Frontier Models
Sep 22, 2026Xiaoyu Luo, Tao Ren, Wenrui Yu +3LLM Interpretability CoT Reasoning
Department of Computer Science Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark · Department of Electronic Systems Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark · Seafill
Combining Hierarchical Cognitive Process with Process Supervision for Interpretable Scene Safety Understanding
Sep 22, 2026Zhiyun Jiang, Hanyong Wang, Binbin Liang +4LLM Interpretability Process Supervision
Rewired or Gated? How Instruction Tuning Shapes Knowledge-Conflict Circuits in LLMs
Sep 22, 2026Shubham Santosh Pandere, Gautam Ranka, Ritika Varshney +3Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models LLM Interpretability
IvLabs, VNIT
Matryoshka attribution: Learning to attribute language model outputs to representations and weights
Sep 22, 2026Aryaman Arora, Kirill Acharya, Nathan Hu +4LLM Interpretability Circuits in Language Models
Stanford University
The Answer-Basin Representation Hypothesis: We Are Not Probing or Steering Concepts
Sep 21, 2026Manjiang Yu, Hongji Li, Zihan Wang +5LLM Interpretability Linear Representation Hypothesis
The University of Queensland · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Institute of Science Tokyo
Written as a Record, Read as an Address: What a Forward Pass Leaves in an Operation's KV Cache
Sep 21, 2026Lingfeng Wu, Behzad ShomaliKV Caching LLM Interpretability
University of Bonn · Lamarr Institute
Misaligned Clinical Risk Classification and Cost Asymmetry in Open-Weight Large Language Models
Sep 21, 2026Star S. D. Liu, Xiyu Ding, Robert B. Barrett +3Cost-Sensitive Learning LLM Interpretability
Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA · Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA · National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
From Concept Alignment to Causal Grounding: An Intervention Test of Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness
Sep 19, 2026Qianli Wang, Yilong Wang, Dennis Wei +5CoT Faithfulness LLM Interpretability
Technische Universität Berlin · German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) · IBM Research +4
Same Outcome, Different Readout: What Does a Steerable Valence Direction in LLMs Represent?
Sep 19, 2026Weihan Li, Xinlei Chen, Yuhan Song +2Language Model Steering LLM Interpretability
The University of Tokyo · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Xeno-Interpretability: Investigating the Alien Minds of LLMs
Sep 17, 2026F. Pierucci, M. Bracale Syrnikov, M. Prandi +3LLM Interpretability Mechanistic Interpretability
Icaro Foundation · Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies · University of Amsterdam +1
The Role of Fine-grained Harm Signals in LLM Safety
Sep 16, 2026Soyeon Park, Seogyeong Jeong, Sunwoo Kim +1LLM Interpretability LLM Safety
KAIST
Weakening Neurons: An Input-Output Functionality in Transformers with Outsize Influence
Sep 16, 2026Sebastian Gerstner, Hilal AlQuabeh, Kentaro Inui +1Transformer Interpretability Transformer FFNs
LMU Munich and Munich Center for Machine Learning · MBZUAI · Tohoku University +1
An Empirical Study of Counterfactual Self-Explanations in LLMs
Sep 15, 2026Giannis Kalyvas, Giorgos Filandrianos, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis +2Counterfactual Explanations Faithfulness of Language Model Explanations
National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece · Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal
TAME: Token Attribution and Masking for Emergent misalignment
Sep 15, 2026Md Rayhanul Masud, Md Rizwan ParvezLLM Interpretability LLM Fine-Tuning
University of California, Riverside · 2Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)
Interpreting and Steering LLM Agents for Social Simulations
Sep 14, 2026Jiayue Gaveal Fan, Arul Murugan, Shreyas Krishnan +1LLM Interpretability Human Behavior Simulation
1Data Innovation and AI Lab (DIAL), University of California, Berkeley · 2National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Empathy Is Steerable but Multi-Axial: Mechanism Geometry and Persona Effects in LLMs
Sep 14, 2026JuHeon Ha, Byounghan Lee, Yunseo Choi +1Language Model Steering LLM Interpretability
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Ajou University
The Misery of Mechanistic Interpretability: A Formal Perspective
Sep 14, 2026Tobias Ladner, Matthias AlthoffNeural Network Verification LLM Interpretability
Technical University of Munich, Germany
Artificial entrepreneurial cognition: Locating and causally steering an opportunity recognition dial inside large language models (LLMs)
Sep 14, 2026Christian Fisch, Angela Altmeier, Martin Obschonka +2LLM Interpretability
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 1855, Luxembourg · Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1018 TV, The Netherlands · Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark
Sep 14, 2026Divya Appapogu, Freya Behrens, Yonatan Belinkov +1LLM Interpretability Representation Geometry in Language Models
Department of Computer Science, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA · Department of Computer Science, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel · Department of Computer Science, Kempner Institute, Harvard University, Boston, USA
Calibrating Interpretability Instruments Before Trusting Their Verdicts
Sep 13, 2026Orion Reblitz-RichardsonLLM Interpretability Causal Interpretability
Distiller Labs
From Parameters to Answers: How LLMs Retrieve and Use Their Internal Knowledge
Sep 12, 2026Wenkang Wei, Yuan Fang, Renhe Jiang +2LLM Interpretability Factual Knowledge in Language Models
University of Science and Technology of China Hefei, China · Singapore Management University Singapore, Singapore · The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan +1
Generative Interpretability via Scalable Neuro-Symbolic Models
Sep 11, 2026Xiaocong YangLLM Interpretability LLM Safety

Sep 28, 2026, cs.SDJ/K move · Enter open · S save

On Temporal Binding in Large Audio Language Models

Paul Primus, Gerhard Widmer

Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria · LIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

LLM Interpretability Audio Reasoning Audio-Language Models Temporal Audio Grounding

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Reasoning about temporal structure of audio recordings requires Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) to associate sound events with their temporal position. Understanding the underlying mechanisms is a first step toward diagnosing failures and identifying model components that may need improvement. Using mechanistic interpretability, we investigate how temporal information is represented and bound to sound events in three open-source LALMs. We find that across all three, event-specific location becomes concentrated in event name representations at intermediate modality integration layers. These representations encode coarse event position along a low-dimensional, curved relative time trajectory. Steering event name representations along this trajectory systematically shifts before/after beliefs, providing evidence that these representations contribute to coarse temporal reasoning. In contrast, the same interventions do not reliably shift predicted onset timestamps, suggesting that coarse temporal reasoning and precise metric event localization rely on distinct mechanisms.

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Latest papers 546