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Alex McKenzie

3 accepted papers

2026

Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in Language Models: Evidence for Internal Consistency Monitoring in Llama-3.3-70B

ICML 2026poster

Large language models can resist task-misaligned activation steering during inference, sometimes recovering mid-generation to produce improved responses even when steering remains active. We term this Endogenous Steering Resistance (ESR). Using sparse autoencoder (SAE) latents to steer model activat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning Self-Interpretation from Interpretability Artifacts: Training Lightweight Adapters on Vector-Label Pairs

ICML 2026poster

Self-interpretation methods prompt language models to describe their own internal states, but remain unreliable due to hyperparameter sensitivity. We show that training lightweight adapters on interpretability artifacts, while keeping the LM entirely frozen, yields reliable self-interpretation acros…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Detecting High-Stakes Interactions with Activation Probes

NeurIPS 2025poster

Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting ``high-stakes'' interactions---where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm---as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such moni…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar