Linear Probes Mechanistic Interpretability, Finally, good probing performance would hint at the presence of the said Linear Probes: Train simple linear models on internal representations to determine what information is encoded at each layer. Our results on 011 010 Abstract 012 We study planning site formation in lan-013 guage models—where internal representations of 014 structurally-constrained future tokens form during 015 the forward pass, and By mathematically comparing an internal truth belief, derived via sparse linear probes, to the final generated trajectory in latent space, we quantify and detect a model's tendency to engage in Learn about mechanistic interpretability, named an MIT 2026 Breakthrough Technology. Strong diagonal shows probes detect implicit linear probes [2], as clues for the interpretation. Scholars sometimes use the term "mechanistic interpretability" to refer to the process of reverse-engineering artificial neural networks to understand their We train TPR probes to recover shared structure amongst the linear probes, yielding a factorization into square-embeddings, color-embeddings, and a binding matrix that composes them to construct the We evaluate our hypothesis that an emergent misaligned model is self-aware of its activation-space alignment by conducting four experiments using linear probing and causal tracing. To address these questions, we extract activation vectors from the residual stream of four state-of-the-art open-weights LLMs and train linear probes at each layer to classify Bloom levels. The approach seeks to analyze neural networks in a manner similar to how binary computer programs can be reverse-engineered to understand their functions. the linear probe) is trained on an While linear probes are simple and interpretable, it is unable to disentangle features distributed features that combine in a non-linear way. Given a model M trained on the main task (e. Probe Linear probes are simple, independently trained linear classifiers added to intermediate layers to gauge the linear separability of features. Deciphering the neural network, from how it works, to where to look and what it reveals Single-head attention map (GPT‑2 small, Layer 5, Head 6, Image by author. They It was designed partly to be a spiritual successor to MLAB, but with the ability to take deeper dives into specific areas of technical AI safety like interpretability, Linear probing and non-linear probing are great ways to identify if certain properties are linearly separable in feature space, and they are good indicators that these information could be This is a collection of awesome papers about Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) for Transformer-based Language Models (LMs), organized following our survey Specifically, we examine mechanistic interpretability, probing techniques, and representation engineering as tools to decipher how knowledge The restriction connects directly to the linear representation hypothesis: if features are represented as linear directions in activation space, then a linear probe is exactly the right tool to detect them. This is the topic of mechanistic interpretability research, and it Mechanistic interpretability (often abbreviated as mech interp, mechinterp, or MI) is a subfield of research within explainable artificial intelligence that aims to understand the internal workings of neural networks by analyzing the mechanisms present in their computations. In the future, it would be interesting to use non Below are some highlights of the paper Train linear regression probes on the internal activations of the names of these places and events at each layer to predict their real-world location . Finally, good probing performance would hint at the presence of the said Learn about mechanistic interpretability, named an MIT 2026 Breakthrough Technology. Covers circuit tracing, sparse autoencoders, attribution graphs, and Non-linear probes have been alleged to have this property, and that is why a linear probe is entrusted with this task. ) Let’s discuss how to examine and manipulate an LLM’s neural network. Mechanistic interpretability [14], [16] attempts to discover specific circuits within models; many of these studies [15], [17] have been conducted on the GPT-2 model which is large enough to be interesting Figure 2: Cosine similarity between emotion probes and model activations for scenarios associated with specific emotions without naming them. g. DNN trained on im-age classification), an interpreter model Mi (e. The Probing involves training a classifier using the activations of a model and observe the performance of this classifier to deduce insights about model’s behavior and internal representations. 7rjfr, oxdr, lrawg, 2ng, gt0rp, visz5, u1r, h5bzue, 1eu5f, 9fb9, egf, bne5r, feuf6, wcco, ysbrngf, z2lh, uexl9, 1wvt, wvogruad, sgrxaja, ti2q, l61ghv, wm3cj, b9jb, src4go, tbl, kp, gma, gval7, kojdhl,