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Nikhil Prakash

4 accepted papers

2026

Language Models Use Lookbacks to Track Beliefs

ICLR 2026poster

How do language models (LMs) represent characters’ beliefs, especially when those beliefs may differ from reality? This question lies at the heart of understanding the Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities of LMs. We analyze LMs' ability to reason about characters’ beliefs using causal mediation and abs…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MIB: A Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark

ICML 2025poster

How can we know whether new mechanistic interpretability methods achieve real improvements? In pursuit of lasting evaluation standards, we propose MIB, a Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark, with two tracks spanning four tasks and five models. MIB favors methods that precisely and concisely recov…

2025

NNsight and NDIF: Democratizing Access to Open-Weight Foundation Model Internals

ICLR 2025poster

We introduce NNsight and NDIF, technologies that work in tandem to enable scientific study of the representations and computations learned by very large neural networks. NNsight is an open-source system that extends PyTorch to introduce deferred remote execution. The National Deep Inference Fabric (…

2024

Fine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking

ICLR 2024poster

Fine-tuning on generalized tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and mathematics has been shown to enhance language models' performance on a range of tasks. Nevertheless, explanations of how such fine-tuning influences the internal computations in these models remain elusive. We stud…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar