How can a language model find the veggies in a menu?

New pre-print where we investigate the internal mechanisms of LLMs when filtering on a list of options.

Spoiler: turns out LLMs use strategies surprisingly similar to functional programming (think "filter" from python)! 🧵

How do language models track mental states of each character in a story, often referred to as Theory of Mind?

We reverse-engineered how LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct handles a belief-tracking task and found something surprising: it uses mechanisms strikingly similar to pointer variables in C programming!

What will be the linchpin for AI dominance?

Read our NSF/OSTP recommendations written with Goodfire's Tom McGrath tommcgrath.github.io, Transluce's Sarah Schwettmann cogconfluence.com, MIT's Dylan Hadfield-Menell @dhadfieldmenell.bsky.social

TLDR; Dominance comes from **interpretability** 🧵 ↘️

I'm searching for some comp/ling experts to provide a precise definition of “slop” as it refers to text (see: corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...)

I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏

Excited about recent reasoning models? What is happening under the hood?
Join ARBOR: Analysis of Reasoning Behaviors thru *Open Research* - a radically open collaboration to reverse-engineer reasoning models!
Learn more: arborproject.github.io
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New paper–accepted as *spotlight* at #ICLR2025! 🧵👇

We show a competition dynamic between several algorithms splits a toy model’s ICL abilities into four broad phases of train/test settings! This means ICL is akin to a mixture of different algorithms, not a monolithic ability.

PhD Applicants: remember that the Northeastern Computer Science PhD application deadline is Dec 15.

It's a terrific time to do a PhD, with so many interesting things happening in AI.

Apply here:

www.khoury.northeastern.edu/apply/phd-ap...