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Julian Minder

5 accepted papers

2026

Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers

ICML 2026oral

Large language model (LLM) activations are notoriously difficult to understand, with most existing techniques using complex, specialized methods for interpreting them. Recent work has proposed a simpler approach known as LatentQA: training LLMs to directly accept LLM activations as inputs and answer…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Narrow Finetuning Leaves Clearly Readable Traces in the Activation Differences

ICLR 2026poster

Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for safety research. Model diffing--the study of differences between base and finetuned models--is a promising approach…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Controllable Context Sensitivity and the Knob Behind It

ICLR 2025poster

When making predictions, a language model must trade off how much it relies on its context vs. its prior knowledge. Choosing how sensitive the model is to its context is a fundamental functionality, as it enables the model to excel at tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and question-answering.…

2025

Overcoming Sparsity Artifacts in Crosscoders to Interpret Chat-Tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Model diffing is the study of how fine-tuning changes a model's representations and internal algorithms. Many behaviors of interest are introduced during fine-tuning, and model diffing offers a promising lens to interpret such behaviors. Crosscoders are a recent model diffing method that learns a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability?

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

The concept of causal abstraction got recently popularised to demystify the opaque decision-making processes of machine learning models; in short, a neural network can be abstracted as a higher-level algorithm if there exists a function which allows us to map between them. Notably, most interpretabi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar