Large Language Model
FIND: A Function Description Benchmark for Evaluating Interpretability Methods Sarah Schwettmann
The central task of interpretability research is to explain the functions that AI systems learn from data. Investigating these functions requires experimentation with trained models, using tools that incorporate varying degrees of human input. Hand-tooled approaches that rely on close manual inspection [Zeiler and Fergus, 2014, Zhou et al., 2014, Mahendran and V edaldi, 2015, Olah et al., 2017, 2020, Elhage et al., 2021] or search for predefined phenomena [Wang et al., 2022, Nanda
Investigating Hallucination in Conversations for Low Resource Languages
Das, Amit, Hasan, Md. Najib, Sarkar, Souvika, Zhang, Zheng, Jamshidi, Fatemeh, Bhattacharya, Tathagata, Raychawdhury, Nilanjana, Feng, Dongji, Jain, Vinija, Chadha, Aman
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating text that closely resemble human writing. However, they often generate factually incorrect statements, a problem typically referred to as 'hallucination'. Addressing hallucination is crucial for enhancing the reliability and effectiveness of LLMs. While much research has focused on hallucinations in English, our study extends this investigation to conversational data in three languages: Hindi, Farsi, and Mandarin. We offer a comprehensive analysis of a dataset to examine both factual and linguistic errors in these languages for GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, Llama-3.1, Gemma-2.0, DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen-3. We found that LLMs produce very few hallucinated responses in Mandarin but generate a significantly higher number of hallucinations in Hindi and Farsi.
Where does an LLM begin computing an instruction?
Pola, Aditya, Balasubramanian, Vineeth N.
Following an instruction involves distinct sub-processes, such as reading content, reading the instruction, executing it, and producing an answer. We ask where, along the layer stack, instruction following begins, the point where reading gives way to doing. We introduce three simple datasets (Key-Value, Quote Attribution, Letter Selection) and two hop compositions of these tasks. Using activation patching on minimal-contrast prompt pairs, we measure a layer-wise flip rate that indicates when substituting selected residual activations changes the predicted answer. Across models in the Llama family, we observe an inflection point, which we term onset, where interventions that change predictions before this point become largely ineffective afterward. Multi-hop compositions show a similar onset location. These results provide a simple, replicable way to locate where instruction following begins and to compare this location across tasks and model sizes.
Temporal Predictors of Outcome in Reasoning Language Models
The chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm uses the elicitation of step-by-step rationales as a proxy for reasoning, gradually refining the model's latent representation of a solution. However, it remains unclear just how early a Large Language Model (LLM) internally commits to an eventual outcome. We probe this by training linear classifiers on hidden states after the first t reasoning tokens, showing that eventual correctness is highly predictable after only a few tokens, even when longer outputs are needed to reach a definite answer. We show that, for harder questions, a drop in predictive accuracy highlights a selection artifact: hard items are disproportionately represented in long CoTs. Overall, our results imply that for reasoning models, internal self-assessment of success tends to emerge after only a few tokens, with implications for interpretability and for inference-time control.
Generating Natural-Language Surgical Feedback: From Structured Representation to Domain-Grounded Evaluation
Nasriddinov, Firdavs, Kocielnik, Rafal, Anandkumar, Anima, Hung, Andrew J.
High-quality intraoperative feedback from a surgical trainer is pivotal for improving trainee performance and long-term skill acquisition. Automating natural, trainer-style feedback promises timely, accessible, and consistent guidance at scale but requires models that understand clinically relevant representations. We present a structure-aware pipeline that learns a surgical action ontology from real trainer-to-trainee transcripts (33 surgeries) and uses it to condition feedback generation. We contribute by (1) mining Instrument-Action-Target (IAT) triplets from real-world feedback text and clustering surface forms into normalized categories, (2) fine-tuning a video-to-IAT model that leverages the surgical procedure and task contexts as well as fine-grained temporal instrument motion, and (3) demonstrating how to effectively use IAT triplet representations to guide GPT-4o in generating clinically grounded, trainer-style feedback. We show that, on Task 1: Video-to-IAT recognition, our context injection and temporal tracking deliver consistent AUC gains (Instrument: 0.67 to 0.74; Action: 0.60 to 0.63; Tissue: 0.74 to 0.79). For Task 2: feedback text generation (rated on a 1-5 fidelity rubric where 1 = opposite/unsafe, 3 = admissible, and 5 = perfect match to a human trainer), GPT-4o from video alone scores 2.17, while IAT conditioning reaches 2.44 (+12.4%), doubling the share of admissible generations with score >= 3 from 21% to 42%. Traditional text-similarity metrics also improve: word error rate decreases by 15-31% and ROUGE (phrase/substring overlap) increases by 9-64%. Grounding generation in explicit IAT structure improves fidelity and yields clinician-verifiable rationales, supporting auditable use in surgical training.