Mechanistic Interpretability of Socio-Political Frames in Language Models

Hadi Asghari; Sami Nenno

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arXiv · 2510.03799

Mechanistic Interpretability of Socio-Political Frames in Language Models

Hadi Asghari·Sami Nenno

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Abstract

This paper explores the ability of large language models to generate and recognize deep cognitive frames, particularly in socio-political contexts. We demonstrate that LLMs are highly fluent in generating texts that evoke specific frames and can recognize these frames in zero-shot settings. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability research, we investigate the location of the `strict father' and `nurturing parent' frames within the model's hidden representation, identifying singular dimensions that correlate strongly with their presence. Our findings contribute to understanding how LLMs capture and express meaningful human concepts.

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Hadi Asghari, Sami Nenno. 2025-10-04. Mechanistic Interpretability of Socio-Political Frames in Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03799

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