Interpretability

Opening — Why this matters now AI safety is drifting toward an uncomfortable paradox. The more capable large language models become, the less transparent their internal decision-making appears — and the more brittle our existing safeguards feel. Text-based moderation catches what models say, not what they are doing. Activation-based safety promised to fix this, but in practice it has inherited many of the same flaws: coarse labels, opaque triggers, and painful retraining cycles. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Large language models are supposed to speak our language. Yet as they become more capable, something uncomfortable emerges: when pushed to cooperate efficiently, models often abandon natural language altogether. This paper shows that modern vision–language models (VLMs) can spontaneously invent task-specific communication protocols—compressed, opaque, and sometimes deliberately unreadable to outsiders—without any fine-tuning. Just prompts. ...

Opening — Why this matters now LLM-powered agents are no longer a novelty. They calculate loans, file expenses, query databases, orchestrate workflows, and—when things go wrong—quietly fabricate tool calls that look correct but aren’t. Unlike textual hallucinations, tool-calling hallucinations don’t merely misinform users; they bypass security controls, corrupt data, and undermine auditability. In short: once agents touch real systems, hallucinations become operational risk. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Multimodal LLMs are increasingly being asked to reason about time series: markets, traffic, power grids, pollution. Charts are rendered. Prompts are polished. The answers sound confident. And yet—too often—they’re wrong for the most boring reason imaginable: the model never actually reasons. Instead, it pattern-matches. This paper dissects that failure mode with unusual clarity. The authors argue that the bottleneck is not model scale, data access, or even modality alignment. It’s the absence of explicit reasoning priors that connect observed temporal patterns to downstream outcomes. Without those priors, multimodal LLMs hallucinate explanations after the fact, mistaking surface similarity for causality. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Large language models have learned to think out loud. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default solution for math, planning, and multi-step decision tasks. The industry applauded: more transparency, better answers, apparent interpretability. Then reality intervened. Despite elegant reasoning traces, models still reach incorrect conclusions—sometimes confidently, sometimes catastrophically. Worse, the mistakes are no longer obvious. They creep in quietly, spread across steps, and survive superficial self-corrections. What we call “hallucination” has grown up. And our detection methods have not. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Cancer pain is rarely a surprise to clinicians. Yet it still manages to arrive uninvited, often at night, often under-treated, and almost always after the window for calm, preventive adjustment has closed. In lung cancer wards, up to 90% of patients experience moderate to severe pain episodes — and most of these episodes are predictable in hindsight. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Large Language Models have learned how to think out loud. What they still struggle with is knowing when that thinking is wrong — while it is happening. In high‑stakes domains like mathematics, finance, or policy automation, delayed error detection is not a feature; it is a liability. Most modern reasoning pipelines still follow an awkward split: first generate reasoning, then verify it — often with a separate model. Humans do not work this way. We reason and judge simultaneously. This paper asks a simple but uncomfortable question: what if LLMs were trained to do the same? ...

Why this matters now Every few months, another AI model promises to be more “aware” — but awareness is hard when memory is mush. Traditional large language models (LLMs) bury their knowledge across billions of parameters like a neural hoarder: everything is stored, but nothing is labeled. Updating a single fact means retraining the entire organism. The result? Models that can write essays about Biden while insisting he’s still president. ...

Opening — Why this matters now The age of “smart” AI models has reached an uncomfortable truth: they can ace your math exam but fail your workflow. While frontier systems like GPT‑4o and Claude‑Sonnet solve increasingly complex symbolic puzzles, they stumble when asked to reason through time—to connect what happened, what’s happening, and what must happen next. In a world shifting toward autonomous agents and decision‑chain AI, this isn’t a minor bug—it’s a systemic limitation. ...

Opening — Why this matters now The academic world has been buzzing ever since a Nature paper claimed that large language models (LLMs) had made “mathematical discoveries.” Specifically, through a method called FunSearch, LLMs were said to have evolved novel heuristics for the classic bin packing problem—an NP-hard optimization task as old as modern computer science itself. The headlines were irresistible: AI discovers new math. But as with many shiny claims, the real question is whether the substance matches the spectacle. ...