{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/position-paper-toward-new-frameworks-for","title":"Challenges in Mechanistically Interpreting Model Representations","arxiv_id":"2402.03855","date":"2024-02-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Satvik Golechha","James Dao"],"abstract":"Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to understand AI models by reverse-engineering the exact algorithms neural networks learn. Most works in MI so far have studied behaviors and capabilities that are trivial and token-aligned. However, most capabilities important for safety and trust are not that trivial, which advocates for the study of hidden representations inside these networks as the unit of analysis. We formalize representations for features and behaviors, highlight their importance and evaluation, and perform an exploratory study of dishonesty representations in `Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1'. We justify that studying representations is an important and under-studied field, and highlight several challenges that arise while attempting to do so through currently established methods in MI, showing their insufficiency and advocating work on new frameworks for the same.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03855v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03855v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"position-paper-toward-new-frameworks-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/7vik/mi_challenges_with_representations","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"},{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.03855","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2402.03855"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/7vik/mi_challenges_with_representations","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"34ec70cd0e28125a","entry":"honesty_function_dataset","repo":"7vik/mi_challenges_with_representations","repo_kind":"official","path":"rep_eng/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/7vik/mi_challenges_with_representations/blob/HEAD/rep_eng/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"GPL-3.0","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"34ec70cd0e28125a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}