8 papers
Geometry-Aware CLIP Retrieval via Local Cross-Modal Alignment and Steering
Nirmalendu Prakash, Narmeen Fatimah Oozeer, Xin Su +8
CLIP retrieval is typically framed as a pointwise similarity problem in a shared embedding space. While CLIP achieves strong global cross-modal alignment, many retrieval failures a…
Curveball Steering: The Right Direction To Steer Isn't Always Linear
Shivam Raval, Hae Jin Song, Linlin Wu +4
Activation steering is a widely used approach for controlling large language model (LLM) behavior by intervening on internal representations. Existing methods largely rely on the L…
Understanding and Mitigating Dataset Corruption in LLM Steering
Cullen Anderson, Narmeen Oozeer, Foad Namjoo +3
Contrastive steering has been shown as a simple and effective method to adjust the generative behavior of LLMs at inference time. It uses examples of prompt responses with and with…
DreamReader: An Interpretability Toolkit for Text-to-Image Models
Nirmalendu Prakash, Narmeen Oozeer, Michael Lan +6
Despite the rapid adoption of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, causal and representation-level analysis remains fragmented and largely limited to isolated probing techniques.…
Beyond I'm Sorry, I Can't: Dissecting Large Language Model Refusal
Nirmalendu Prakash, Yeo Wei Jie, Amir Abdullah +3
Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study…
Distribution-Aware Feature Selection for SAEs
Narmeen Oozeer, Nirmalendu Prakash, Michael Lan +2
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose neural activations into interpretable features. A widely adopted variant, the TopK SAE, reconstructs each token from its K most active latents.…
TinySQL: A Progressive Text-to-SQL Dataset for Mechanistic Interpretability Research
Abir Harrasse, Philip Quirke, Clement Neo +3
Mechanistic interpretability research faces a gap between analyzing simple circuits in toy tasks and discovering features in large models. To bridge this gap, we propose text-to-SQ…
Activation Space Interventions Can Be Transferred Between Large Language Models
Narmeen Oozeer, Dhruv Nathawani, Nirmalendu Prakash +3
The study of representation universality in AI models reveals growing convergence across domains, modalities, and architectures. However, the practical applications of representati…