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Capturing Polysemanticity with PRISM: A Multi-Concept Feature Description Framework

Neural Information Processing Systems

Automated interpretability research aims to identify concepts encoded in neural network features to enhance human understanding of model behavior. Within the context of large language models (LLMs) for natural language processing (NLP), current automated neuron-level feature description methods face two key challenges: limited robustness and the assumption that each neuron encodes a single concept (monosemanticity), despite increasing evidence of polysemanticity. This assumption restricts the expressiveness of feature descriptions and limits their ability to capture the full range of behaviors encoded in model internals. To address this, we introduce Polysemantic FeatuRe Identification and Scoring Method (PRISM), a novel framework specifically designed to capture the complexity of features in LLMs. Unlike approaches that assign a single description per neuron, common in many automated interpretability methods in NLP, PRISM produces more nuanced descriptions that account for both monosemantic and polysemantic behavior. We apply PRISM to LLMs and, through extensive benchmarking against existing methods, demonstrate that our approach produces more accurate and faithful feature descriptions, improving both overall description quality (via a description score) and the ability to capture distinct concepts when polysemanticity is present (via a polysemanticity score).


Capturing Polysemanticity with PRISM: A Multi-Concept Feature Description Framework

Neural Information Processing Systems

Automated interpretability research aims to identify concepts encoded in neural network features to enhance human understanding of model behavior. Within the context of large language models (LLMs) for natural language processing (NLP), current automated neuron-level feature description methods face two key challenges: limited robustness and the assumption that each neuron encodes a single concept (monosemanticity), despite increasing evidence of polysemanticity. This assumption restricts the expressiveness of feature descriptions and limits their ability to capture the full range of behaviors encoded in model internals. To address this, we introduce Polysemantic FeatuRe Identification and Scoring Method (PRISM), a novel framework specifically designed to capture the complexity of features in LLMs. Unlike approaches that assign a single description per neuron, common in many automated interpretability methods in NLP, PRISM produces more nuanced descriptions that account for both monosemantic and polysemantic behavior. We apply PRISM to LLMs and, through extensive benchmarking against existing methods, demonstrate that our approach produces more accurate and faithful feature descriptions, improving both overall description quality (via a description score) and the ability to capture distinct concepts when polysemanticity is present (via a polysemanticity score).


Prism: A Framework for Decoupling and Assessing the Capabilities of VLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks.By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs $10 \times$ larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar.


The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Human feedback is central to the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, open questions remain about the methods (how), domains (where), people (who) and objectives (to what end) of feedback processes. To navigate these questions, we introduce PRISM, a new dataset which maps the sociodemographics and stated preferences of 1,500 diverse participants from 75 countries, to their contextual preferences and fine-grained feedback in 8,011 live conversations with 21 LLMs. With PRISM, we contribute (i) wider geographic and demographic participation in feedback; (ii) census-representative samples for two countries (UK, US); and (iii) individualised ratings that link to detailed participant profiles, permitting personalisation and attribution of sample artefacts. We target subjective and multicultural perspectives on value-laden and controversial issues, where we expect interpersonal and cross-cultural disagreement. We use PRISM in three case studies to demonstrate the need for careful consideration of which humans provide alignment data.




OpenAI's latest product lets you vibe code science

MIT Technology Review

OpenAI's latest product lets you vibe code science Prism is a ChatGPT-powered text editor that automates much of the work involved in writing scientific papers. OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers. The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up their work in much the same way that chatbots are now embedded into popular programming editors. Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, pushes that analogy himself. "I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering," he said at a press briefing yesterday.


OpenAI releases Prism, a Claude Code-like app for scientific research

Engadget

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. Prism can edit and format LaTeX. OpenAI is releasing a new app called Prism today, and it hopes it does for science what coding agents like Claude Code and its own Codex platform have done for programming. Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do.


Language Through a Prism: A Spectral Approach for Multiscale Language Representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Language exhibits structure at a wide range of scales, from subwords to words, sentences, paragraphs, and documents. We propose building models that isolate scale-specific information in deep representations, and develop methods for encouraging models during training to learn more about particular scales of interest. Our method for creating scale-specific neurons in deep NLP models constrains how the activation of a neuron can change across the tokens of an input by interpreting those activations as a digital signal and filtering out parts of its frequency spectrum. This technique enables us to extract scale-specific information from BERT representations: by filtering out different frequencies we can produce new representations that perform well on part of speech tagging (word-level), dialog speech acts classification (utterance-level), or topic classification (document-level), while performing poorly on the other tasks. We also present a prism layer for use during training, which constrains different neurons of a BERT model to different parts of the frequency spectrum. Our proposed BERT + Prism model is better able to predict masked tokens using long-range context, and produces individual multiscale representations that perform with comparable or improved performance across all three tasks. Our methods are general and readily applicable to other domains besides language, such as images, audio, and video.


PRISM: Lightweight Multivariate Time-Series Classification through Symmetric Multi-Resolution Convolutional Layers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multivariate time series classification supports applications from wearable sensing to biomedical monitoring and demands models that can capture both short-term patterns and longer-range temporal dependencies. Despite recent advances, Transformer and CNN models often remain computationally heavy and rely on many parameters. This work presents PRISM (Per-channel Resolution Informed Symmetric Module), a lightweight fully convolutional classifier. Operating in a channel-independent manner, in its early stage it applies a set of multi-resolution symmetric convolutional filters. This symmetry enforces structural constraints inspired by linear-phase FIR filters from classical signal processing, effectively halving the number of learnable parameters within the initial layers while preserving the full receptive field. Across the diverse UEA multivariate time-series archive as well as specific benchmarks in human activity recognition, sleep staging, and biomedical signals, PRISM matches or outperforms state-of-the-art CNN and Transformer models while using significantly fewer parameters and markedly lower computational cost. By bringing a principled signal processing prior into a modern neural architecture, PRISM offers an effective and computationally economical solution for multivariate time series classification.1. Introduction Multivariate time series, characterised by intricate temporal dependencies, are common in finance, healthcare, environmental science, and human activity recognition. Deep learning has improved analysis and classification for such data, yet state-of-the-art models often incur high computational cost, heavy pa-rameterisation, and limited robustness in realistic data regimes. Transformer architectures, adapted from NLP for long-range dependencies, have been applied to time series. Despite promising results, their extensive parameter counts can lead to overfitting and high memory use [1]. In practice, self-attention can struggle with noisy, redundant signals [2, 3].