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Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Connor Lawless, Lily Weng, Berk Ustun, Madeleine Udell

Machine learning models can assign fixed predictions that preclude individuals from changing their outcome. Existing approaches to audit fixed predictions do so on a pointwise basis, which requires access to an existing dataset of individuals and may fail to anticipate fixed predictions in out-of-sample data. This work presents a new paradigm to identify fixed predictions by finding confined regions of the feature space in which all individuals receive fixed predictions. This paradigm enables the certification of recourse for out-of-sample data, works in settings without representative datasets, and provides interpretable descriptions of individuals with fixed predictions. We develop a fast method to discover confined regions for linear classifiers using mixed-integer quadratically constrained programming. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of confined regions across diverse applications. Our results highlight that existing pointwise verification methods fail to anticipate future individuals with fixed predictions, while our method both identifies them and provides an interpretable description.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Xinyue Xu, Yueying Hu, Hui Tang, Yi Qin, Lu Mi, Hao Wang, Xiaomeng Li

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by explaining predictions through human-understandable concepts but typically assume that training and test data share the same distribution. This assumption often fails under domain shifts, leading to degraded performance and poor generalization. To address these limitations and improve the robustness of CBMs, we propose the Concept-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (CUDA) framework. CUDA is designed to: (1) align concept representations across domains using adversarial training, (2) introduce a relaxation threshold to allow minor domain-specific differences in concept distributions, thereby preventing performance drop due to over-constraints of these distributions, (3) infer concepts directly in the target domain without requiring labeled concept data, enabling CBMs to adapt to diverse domains, and (4) integrate concept learning into conventional domain adaptation (DA) with theoretical guarantees, improving interpretability and establishing new benchmarks for DA. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art CBM and DA methods on real-world datasets.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Gouki Minegishi, Hiroki Furuta, Shohei Taniguchi, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when the answer is included within the context.However, an important property of practical ICL in large language models is the ability to meta-learn how to solve tasks from context, rather than just copying answers from context; how such an ability is obtained during training is largely unexplored.In this paper, we experimentally clarify how such meta-learning ability is acquired by analyzing the dynamics of the model's circuit during training. Specifically, we extend the copy task from previous research into an In-Context Meta Learning setting, where models must infer a task from examples to answer queries.Interestingly, in this setting, we find that there are multiple phases in the process of acquiring such abilities, and that a unique circuit emerges in each phase, contrasting with the single-phases change in induction heads. The emergence of such circuits can be related to several phenomena known in large language models, and our analysis lead to a deeper understanding of the source of the transformer's ICL ability.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Junwei Su, Chuan Wu

This paper investigates the convergence behavior of score-based graph generative models (SGGMs). Unlike common score-based generative models (SGMs) that are governed by a single stochastic differential equation (SDE), SGGMs utilize a system of dependent SDEs, where the graph structure and node features are modeled separately, while accounting for their inherent dependencies. This distinction makes existing convergence analyses from SGMs inapplicable for SGGMs. In this work, we present the first convergence analysis for SGGMs, focusing on the convergence bound (the risk of generative error) across three key graph generation paradigms: (1) feature generation with a fixed graph structure, (2) graph structure generation with fixed node features, and (3) joint generation of both graph structure and node features. Our analysis reveals several unique factors specific to SGGMs (e.g., the topological properties of the graph structure) which significantly affect the convergence bound. Additionally, we offer theoretical insights into the selection of hyperparameters (e.g., sampling steps and diffusion length) and advocate for techniques like normalization to improve convergence. To validate our theoretical findings, we conduct a controlled empirical study using a synthetic graph model. The results in this paper contribute to a deeper theoretical understanding of SGGMs and offer practical guidance for designing more efficient and effective SGGMs.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Harrish Thasarathan, Julian Forsyth, Thomas Fel, Matthew Kowal, Konstantinos Derpanis

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a single model, USAEs jointly learn a universal concept space that can reconstruct and interpret the internal activations of multiple models at once. Our core insight is to train a single, overcomplete sparse autoencoder (SAE) that ingests activations from any model and decodes them to approximate the activations of any other model under consideration. By optimizing a shared objective, the learned dictionary captures common factors of variation—concepts—across different tasks, architectures, and datasets. We show that USAEs discover semantically coherent and important universal concepts across vision models; ranging from low-level features (e.g., colors and textures) to higher-level structures (e.g., parts and objects). Overall, USAEs provide a powerful new method for interpretable cross-model analysis and offers novel applications—such as coordinated activation maximization—that open avenues for deeper insights in multi-model AI systems.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Yu-Neng Chuang, Prathusha Sarma, Parikshit Gopalan, John Boccio, Sara Bolouki, Xia Hu, Helen Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM may be unreliable. Depending on whether an answer is trustworthy, a system can then choose to route the question to another expert, or otherwise fall back on a safe default behavior. In this work, we study the extent to which LLMs can reliably indicate confidence in their answers, and how this notion of confidence can translate into downstream accuracy gains. We propose Self-Reflection with Error-based Feedback (Self-REF), a lightweight training strategy to teach LLMs to express confidence in whether their answers are correct in a reliable manner. Self-REF introduces confidence tokens into the LLM, from which a confidence score can be extracted. Compared to conventional approaches such as verbalizing confidence and examining token probabilities, we demonstrate empirically that confidence tokens show significant improvements in downstream routing and rejection learning tasks.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Hongyi Ling, Haiyang Yu, Zhimeng Jiang, Na Zou, Shuiwang Ji

We consider explainability in equivariant graph neural networks for 3D geometric graphs. While many XAI methods have been developed for analyzing graph neural networks, they predominantly target 2D graph structures. The complex nature of 3D data and the sophisticated architectures of equivariant GNNs present unique challenges. Current XAI techniques either struggle to adapt to equivariant GNNs or fail to effectively handle positional data and evaluate the significance of geometric features adequately. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel method, known as EquiGX, which uses the Deep Taylor decomposition framework to extend the layer-wise relevance propagation rules tailored for spherical equivariant GNNs. Our approach decomposes prediction scores and back-propagates the relevance scores through each layer to the input space. Our decomposition rules provide a detailed explanation of each layer’s contribution to the network’s predictions, thereby enhancing our understanding of how geometric and positional data influence the model’s outputs. Through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, our method demonstrates its capability to identify critical geometric structures and outperform alternative baselines. These results indicate that our method provides significantly enhanced explanations for equivariant GNNs. Our code has been released as part of the AIRS library (https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/).

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Kento Nishi, Rahul Ramesh, Maya Okawa, Mikail Khona, Hidenori Tanaka, Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Knowledge Editing (KE) algorithms alter models' weights to perform targeted updates to incorrect, outdated, or otherwise unwanted factual associations. However, recent work has shown that applying KE can adversely affect models' broader factual recall accuracy and diminish their reasoning abilities. Although these studies give insights into the potential harms of KE algorithms, e.g., performance evaluations on benchmarks, little is understood about why such destructive failures occur. Motivated by this, we define a novel synthetic task in which a Transformer is trained from scratch to internalize a "structured" knowledge graph. The structure enforces relationships between entities of the graph, such that editing a factual association has "trickling effects" on other entities (e.g., altering X's parent is Y to Z affects who X's siblings' parent is). Through evaluations of edited models on this task, we show that KE inadvertently affects representations of entities beyond the targeted one, distorting relevant structures that allow a model to infer unseen knowledge about an entity. We call this phenomenon representation shattering and demonstrate that it degrades models' factual recall and reasoning performance. We further corroborate our findings in naturalistic settings with pre-trained Llama and Mamba models as well. Overall, our work yields a precise mechanistic hypothesis to explain why KE has adverse effects on model abilities.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Zihao Wang, Yibo Jiang, Jiahao Yu, Heqing Huang

Large language models (LLMs) that integrate multiple input roles (e.g., system instructions, user queries, external tool outputs) are increasingly prevalent in practice. Ensuring that the model accurately distinguishes messages from each role—a concept we call *role separation*—is crucial for consistent multi-role behavior. Although recent work often targets state-of-the-art prompt injection defenses, it remains unclear whether such methods truly teach LLMs to differentiate roles or merely memorize known triggers. In this paper, we examine *role-separation learning*: the process of teaching LLMs to robustly distinguish system and user tokens. Through a *simple, controlled experimental framework*, we find that fine-tuned models often rely on two proxies for role identification: (1) task type exploitation, and (2) proximity to begin-of-text. Although data augmentation can partially mitigate these shortcuts, it generally leads to iterative patching rather than a deeper fix. To address this, we propose reinforcing *invariant signals* that mark role boundaries by adjusting token-wise cues in the model's input encoding. In particular, modifying position IDs helps the model learn clearer distinctions and reduces reliance on superficial proxies. By focusing on this mechanism-centered perspective, our work illuminates how LLMs can more reliably maintain consistent multi-role behavior without merely memorizing known prompts or triggers.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Faisal Hamman, Sachindra P Dissanayake, Saumitra Mishra, Freddy Lecue, Sanghamitra Dutta

Fine-tuning LLMs on tabular classification tasks can lead to the phenomenon of *fine-tuning multiplicity* where equally well-performing models make conflicting predictions on the same input. Fine-tuning multiplicity can arise due to variations in the training process, e.g., seed, weight initialization, minor changes to training data, etc., raising concerns about the reliability of Tabular LLMs in high-stakes applications such as finance, hiring, education, healthcare. Our work formalizes this unique challenge of fine-tuning multiplicity in Tabular LLMs and proposes a novel measure to quantify the consistency of individual predictions without expensive model retraining. Our measure quantifies a prediction's consistency by analyzing (sampling) the model's local behavior around that input in the embedding space. Interestingly, we show that sampling in the local neighborhood can be leveraged to provide probabilistic guarantees on prediction consistency under a broad class of fine-tuned models, i.e., inputs with sufficiently high local stability (as defined by our measure) also remain consistent across several fine-tuned models with high probability. We perform experiments on multiple real-world datasets to show that our local stability measure preemptively captures consistency under actual multiplicity across several fine-tuned models, outperforming competing measures.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Bardh Prenkaj, Efstratios Zaradoukas, Gjergji Kasneci

Counterfactual explainability seeks to uncover model decisions by identifying minimal changes to the input that alter the predicted outcome. This task becomes particularly challenging for graph data due to preserving structural integrity and semantic meaning. Unlike prior approaches that rely on forward perturbation mechanisms, we introduce Graph Inverse Style Transfer (GIST), the first framework to re-imagine graph counterfactual generation as a backtracking process, leveraging spectral style transfer. By aligning the global structure with the original input spectrum and preserving local content faithfulness, GIST produces valid counterfactuals as interpolations between the input style and counterfactual content. Tested on 8 binary and multi-class graph classification benchmarks, GIST achieves a remarkable +7.6% improvement in the validity of produced counterfactuals and significant gains (+45.5%) in faithfully explaining the true class distribution. Additionally, GIST's backtracking mechanism effectively mitigates overshooting the underlying predictor's decision boundary, minimizing the spectral differences between the input and the counterfactuals. These results challenge traditional forward perturbation methods, offering a novel perspective that advances graph explainability.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Thomas Fel, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Jacob Prince, Matthew Kowal, Victor Boutin, Isabel Papadimitriou, Binxu Wang, Martin Wattenberg, Demba Ba, Talia Konkle

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we reveal a fundamental limitation: SAEs exhibit severe instability, as identical models trained on similar datasets can produce sharply different dictionaries, undermining their reliability as an interpretability tool. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the Archetypal Analysis framework introduced by Cutler & Breiman (1994) and present Archetypal SAEs (A-SAE), wherein dictionary atoms are constrained to the data’s convex hull. This geometric anchoring significantly enhances the stability and plausibility of inferred dictionaries, and their mildly relaxed variants RA-SAEs further match state-of-the-art reconstruction abilities. To rigorously assess dictionary quality learned by SAEs, we introduce two new benchmarks that test (i) plausibility, if dictionaries recover “true” classification directions and (ii) identifiability, if dictionaries disentangle synthetic concept mixtures. Across all evaluations, RA-SAEs consistently yield more structured representations while uncovering novel, semantically meaningful concepts in large-scale vision models.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Mingyu Jin, Kai Mei, Wujiang Xu, Mingjie Sun, Ruixiang Tang, Mengnan Du, Zirui Liu, Yongfeng Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in contextual knowledge understanding. In this paper, we show for the first time that these concentrated massive values consistently emerge in specific regions of attention queries (Q) and keys (K) while not having such patterns in values (V) in various modern transformer-based LLMs. Through extensive experiments, we further demonstrate that these massive values play a critical role in interpreting contextual knowledge (i.e., knowledge obtained from the current context window) rather than in retrieving parametric knowledge stored within the model’s parameters. Our further investigation of quantization strategies reveals that ignoring these massive values leads to a pronounced drop in performance on tasks requiring rich contextual understanding, aligning with our analysis. Finally, we trace the emergence of concentrated massive values and find that such concentration is caused by Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE) and it appears since very first layers. These findings shed new light on how Q and K operate in LLMs and offer practical insights for model design and optimization. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Rope_with_LLM.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Jack Min Ong, Matthew Di Ferrante, Aaron Pazdera, Ryan Garner, Sami Jaghouar, Manveer Basra, Max Ryabinin, Johannes Hagemann

Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be very capable, but access to frontier models currently relies on inference providers.This introduces trust challenges: how can we be sure that the provider is using the model configuration they claim?We propose TOPLOC, a novel method for verifiable inference that addresses this problem.TOPLOC leverages a compact locality-sensitive hashing mechanism for intermediate activations, which can detect unauthorized modifications to models, prompts, or precision with 100\% accuracy, achieving no false positives or negatives in our empirical evaluations.Our approach is robust across diverse hardware configurations, GPU types, and algebraic reorderings, which allows for validation speeds significantly faster than the original inference.By introducing a polynomial encoding scheme, TOPLOC minimizes the memory overhead of the generated proofs by $1000\times$, requiring only 258 bytes of storage per 32 new tokens, compared to the 262 KB requirement of storing the token embeddings directly for Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct.Our method empowers users to verify LLM inference computations efficiently, fostering greater trust and transparency in open ecosystems and laying a foundation for decentralized, verifiable and trustless AI services.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Xingyi Yang, Constantin Venhoff, Ashkan Khakzar, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Puneet Dokania, Adel Bibi, Phil Torr

Neurons in large language models often exhibit \emph{polysemanticity}, simultaneously encoding multiple unrelated concepts and obscuring interpretability. Instead of relying on post-hoc methods, we present \textbf{MoE-X}, a mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model designed to be \emph{intrinsically} interpretable. Our approach is motivated by the observation that, in language models, wider networks with sparse activations are more likely to capture interpretable factors. however, directly training such large sparse networks is computationally prohibitive. MoE architectures offer a scalable alternative by activating only a subset of experts for any given input, inherently aligning with interpretability objectives. In MoE-X, we establish this connection by rewriting the MoE layer as an equivalent sparse, large MLP. This approach enables efficient scaling of the hidden size while maintaining sparsity. To further enhance interpretability, we enforce sparse activation within each expert and redesign the routing mechanism to prioritize experts with the highest activation sparsity. These designs ensure that only the most salient features are routed and processed by the experts. We evaluate MoE-X on chess and natural language tasks, showing that it achieves performance comparable to dense models while significantly improving interpretability. MoE-X achieves a perplexity better than GPT-2, with interpretability surpassing even sparse autoencoder (SAE)-based approaches.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Pouria Fatemi, Ehsan Sharifian, Mohammad Hossein Yassaee

Counterfactual explanations enhance interpretability by identifying alternative inputs that produce different outputs, offering localized insights into model decisions. However, traditional methods often neglect causal relationships, leading to unrealistic examples. While newer approaches integrate causality, they are computationally expensive. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient method called BRACE based on backtracking counterfactuals that incorporates causal reasoning to generate actionable explanations. We first examine the limitations of existing methods and then introduce our novel approach and its features. We also explore the relationship between our method and previous techniques, demonstrating that it generalizes them in specific scenarios. Finally, experiments show that our method provides deeper insights into model outputs.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Jing Huang, Junyi Tao, Thomas Icard, Diyi Yang, Christopher Potts

Interpretability research now offers a variety of techniques for identifying abstract internal mechanisms in neural networks. Can such techniques be used to predict how models will behave on out-of-distribution examples? In this work, we provide a positive answer to this question. Through a diverse set of language modeling tasks—including symbol manipulation, knowledge retrieval, and instruction following—we show that the most robust features for correctness prediction are those that play a distinctive causal role in the model’s behavior. Specifically, we propose two methods that leverage causal mechanisms to predict the correctness of model outputs: counterfactual simulation (checking whether key causal variables are realized) and value probing (using the values of those variables to make predictions). Both achieve high AUC-ROC in distribution and outperform methods that rely on causal-agnostic features in out-of-distribution settings, where predicting model behaviors is more crucial. Our work thus highlights a novel and significant application for internal causal analysis of language models.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Hayden McTavish, Zachery Boner, Jon Donnelly, Margo Seltzer, Cynthia Rudin

Decision trees are widely used for interpretable machine learning due to their clearly structured reasoning process. However, this structure belies a challenge we refer to as predictive equivalence: a given tree's decision boundary can be represented by many different decision trees. The presence of models with identical decision boundaries but different evaluation processes makes model selection challenging. The models will have different variable importance and behave differently in the presence of missing values, but most optimization procedures will arbitrarily choose one such model to return. We present a boolean logical representation of decision trees that does not exhibit predictive equivalence and is faithful to the underlying decision boundary. We apply our representation to several downstream machine learning tasks. Using our representation, we show that decision trees are surprisingly robust to test-time missingness of feature values; we address predictive equivalence's impact on quantifying variable importance; and we present an algorithm to optimize the cost of reaching predictions.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Seokhun Park, Insung Kong, yongchan Choi, Chanmoo Park, Yongdai Kim

Interpretability for machine learning models is becoming more and more important as machine learning models become more complex. The functional ANOVA model, which decomposes a high-dimensional function into a sum of lower dimensional functions (commonly referred to as components), is one of the most popular tools for interpretable AI, and recently, various neural networks have been developed for estimating each component in the functional ANOVA model. However, such neural networks are highly unstable when estimating each component since the components themselves are not uniquely defined. That is, there are multiple functional ANOVA decompositions for a given function. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network which guarantees a unique functional ANOVA decomposition and thus is able to estimate each component stably. We call our proposed neural network ANOVA Tensor Product Neural Network (ANOVA-TPNN) sinceit is motivated by the tensor product basis expansion.Theoretically, we prove that ANOVA-TPNN can approximate any smooth function well.Empirically, we show that ANOVA-TPNN provide much more stable estimation of each component and thus much more stable interpretation when training data and initial values of the model parameters vary than existing neural networks do.Our source code is released at https://github.com/ParkSeokhun/ANOVA-TPNN

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Gonçalo Paulo, Alex Mallen, Caden Juang, Nora Belrose

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which can be more easily interpretable. However, SAEs can have millions of distinct latents, making it infeasible for humans to manually interpret each one. In this work, we build an open-source automated pipeline to generate and evaluate natural language interpretations for SAE latents using LLMs. We test our framework on SAEs of varying sizes, activation functions, and losses, trained on two different open-weight LLMs. We introduce five new techniques to score the quality of interpretations that are cheaper to run than the previous state of the art. One of these techniques, intervention scoring, evaluates the interpretability of the effects of intervening on a latent, which we find explains latents that are not recalled by existing methods. We propose guidelines for generating better interpretations that remain valid for a broader set of activating contexts, and discuss pitfalls with existing scoring techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/delphi.