activity
20242026
most citedThe Quest for the Right Mediator: Surveying Mechanistic Interpretability Through the Lens of Causal Mediation Analysis

2 citations · 7 across the 28 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

32 papers

cs.CL2026

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Emergent Agreement from Individual Conversations

Adi Simhi, Yaniv Nikankin, Jonathan Herzig +3

As LLM agents interact in the wild and shape each other's decisions, understanding how they converge toward agreement becomes important. We study this in multi-turn conversations w…

cs.CL2026

Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law

Peng Qian, Andrew Li, Sam Chen +3

The distinction between the spirit and letter of the law is a central issue across research and everyday life, and a growing concern for building safe, intelligent machines. What i…

cs.LG2026

MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark

Divya Appapogu, Freya Behrens, Yonatan Belinkov +1

Fine-grained control of language model behaviors (e.g., steering) is among the more actionable outcomes of interpretability research. For binary concepts such as refusal, a single…

cs.CL2026

Do LLMs Choose Like Humans? Using Cognitive Theory to Evaluate LLM Decision-Making

Johnathan Sun, Andrei Shleifer, Yonatan Belinkov

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a range of human-like decision-making behaviors, but whether these reflect similar underlying mechanisms or surface-level mimicry remains uncle…

cs.CL2026

Differentiable Faithfulness Alignment for Cross-Model Circuit Transfer

Shun Shao, Binxu Wang, Shay B. Cohen +2

Mechanistic interpretability has made it possible to localize circuits underlying specific behaviors in language models, but existing methods are expensive, model-specific, and dif…

cs.CL2026

Masked by Consensus: Disentangling Privileged Knowledge in LLM Correctness

Tomer Ashuach, Shai Gretz, Yoav Katz +2

Humans use introspection to evaluate their understanding through private internal states inaccessible to external observers. We investigate whether large language models possess si…

cs.CL2026

Reasoning Models Know What's Important, and Encode It in Their Activations

Yaniv Nikankin, Martin Tutek, Tomer Ashuach +2

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the fin…

cs.CL2026

From Feelings to Metrics: Understanding and Formalizing How Users Vibe-Test LLMs

Itay Itzhak, Eliya Habba, Gabriel Stanovsky +1

Evaluating LLMs is challenging, as benchmark scores often fail to capture models' real-world usefulness. Instead, users often rely on ``vibe-testing'': informal experience-based ev…

cs.CL2026

Large Language Models Generate Harmful Responses Using a Distinct Mechanism, Shared Across Harm Types

Hadas Orgad, Boyi Wei, Kaden Zheng +4

Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreaks that elicit harmful responses, yet the mechanism behind harmful response generation is poorly understood. Here, we investigate…

cs.AI2026

Pitfalls in Evaluating Interpretability Agents

Tal Haklay, Nikhil Prakash, Sana Pandey +5

Automated interpretability systems aim to reduce the need for human labor and scale analysis to increasingly large models and diverse tasks. Recent efforts toward this goal leverag…

cs.LG2026

Between the Layers Lies the Truth: Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs Using Intra-Layer Local Information Scores

Zvi N. Badash, Yonatan Belinkov, Moti Freiman

Large language models (LLMs) are often confidently wrong, making reliable uncertainty estimation (UE) essential. Output-based heuristics are cheap but brittle, while probing intern…

cs.CL2026

Old Habits Die Hard: How Conversational History Geometrically Traps LLMs

Adi Simhi, Fazl Barez, Martin Tutek +2

How does the conversational past of large language models (LLMs) influence their future performance? Recent work suggests that LLMs are affected by their conversational history in…

cs.LG2026

Induction Meets Biology: Mechanisms of Repeat Detection in Protein Language Models

Gal Pomerants, Yaniv Nikankin, Anja Reusch +3

Protein sequences are abundant in repeating segments, both as exact copies and as approximate segments with mutations. These repeats are important for protein structure and functio…

cs.LG2026★ 1 cited

Two Stages of Folding: Convergent Mechanisms in AI Protein Folding Trunks

Kevin Lu, Jannik Brinkmann, Stefan Huber +4

How do protein structure prediction models fold proteins? We investigate this question through causal interventions on the folding trunks of ESMFold, OpenFold, and Boltz-1. Across…

cs.CV2026

Mechanisms of Prompt-Induced Hallucination in Vision-Language Models

William Rudman, Michal Golovanevsky, Dana Arad +4

Large vision-language models (VLMs) are highly capable, yet often hallucinate by favoring textual prompts over visual evidence. We study this failure mode in a controlled object-co…

cs.CL2025

Findings of the BlackboxNLP 2025 Shared Task: Localizing Circuits and Causal Variables in Language Models

Dana Arad, Yonatan Belinkov, Hanjie Chen +5

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) seeks to uncover how language models (LMs) implement specific behaviors, yet measuring progress in MI remains challenging. The recently released M…

cs.CL2025

BlackboxNLP-2025 MIB Shared Task: Improving Circuit Faithfulness via Better Edge Selection

Yaniv Nikankin, Dana Arad, Itay Itzhak +4

One of the main challenges in mechanistic interpretability is circuit discovery, determining which parts of a model perform a given task. We build on the Mechanistic Interpretabili…

cs.CL2025

HACK: Hallucinations Along Certainty and Knowledge Axes

Adi Simhi, Jonathan Herzig, Itay Itzhak +7

Hallucinations in LLMs present a critical barrier to their reliable usage. Existing research usually categorizes hallucination by their external properties rather than by the LLMs'…

cs.CV2025

DeLeaker: Dynamic Inference-Time Reweighting For Semantic Leakage Mitigation in Text-to-Image Models

Mor Ventura, Michael Toker, Or Patashnik +2

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have advanced rapidly, yet they remain vulnerable to semantic leakage, the unintended transfer of semantically related features between distinct entities…

cs.CL2025

Silent Tokens, Loud Effects: Padding in LLMs

Rom Himelstein, Amit LeVi, Yonatan Belinkov +1

Padding tokens are widely used in large language models (LLMs) to equalize sequence lengths during batched inference. While they should be fully masked, implementation errors can c…

cs.CL2025

Global PIQA: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning Across 100+ Languages and Cultures

Tyler A. Chang, Catherine Arnett, Abdelrahman Sadallah +377

To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we pre…

cs.CL2025

ManagerBench: Evaluating the Safety-Pragmatism Trade-off in Autonomous LLMs

Adi Simhi, Jonathan Herzig, Martin Tutek +3

As large language models (LLMs) evolve from conversational assistants into autonomous agents, evaluating the safety of their actions becomes critical. Prior safety benchmarks have…

cs.CL2025

CRISP: Persistent Concept Unlearning via Sparse Autoencoders

Tomer Ashuach, Dana Arad, Aaron Mueller +2

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, the need to selectively remove unwanted knowledge while preserving model utility has become pa…

cs.CL2025

Same Task, Different Circuits: Disentangling Modality-Specific Mechanisms in VLMs

Yaniv Nikankin, Dana Arad, Yossi Gandelsman +1

Vision-Language models (VLMs) show impressive abilities to answer questions on visual inputs (e.g., counting objects in an image), yet demonstrate higher accuracies when performing…