5 papers
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sofroniew, Adam Pearce +13
Out of everything the human brain processes, only a small fraction is consciously accessible, in the sense of being available for verbal report, deliberate control, and flexible re…
Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers
Adam Karvonen, James Chua, Clément Dumas +8
Large language model (LLM) activations are notoriously difficult to understand, with most existing techniques using complex, specialized methods for interpreting them. Recent work…
Auditing language models for hidden objectives
Samuel Marks, Johannes Treutlein, Trenton Bricken +32
We study the feasibility of conducting alignment audits: investigations into whether models have undesired objectives. As a testbed, we train a language model with a hidden objecti…
Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming
Mrinank Sharma, Meg Tong, Jesse Mu +40
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to universal jailbreaks-prompting strategies that systematically bypass model safeguards and enable users to carry out harmful processes…
Compact Proofs of Model Performance via Mechanistic Interpretability
Jason Gross, Rajashree Agrawal, Thomas Kwa +5
We propose using mechanistic interpretability -- techniques for reverse engineering model weights into human-interpretable algorithms -- to derive and compactly prove formal guaran…