arXiv subjects

Diogo de Lucena

Publications and source records attributed to Diogo de Lucena.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in Language Models

Large language models can recover mid-generation from task-misaligned activation steering, producing explicit verbal restarts (e.g., ``wait, that's not right'') and continuing on-topic even while the steering perturbation remains active. We term this Endogenous Steering Resistance (ESR). Using sparse autoencoder (SAE) latents to steer model activations, we find that Llama-3.3-70B exhibits explicit ESR at 3.8%, with smaller models from the Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families showing the explicit form less frequently. Two controls dissociate ESR into a detection event and a sustained-resistance component that conditioning on recent on-topic tokens does not fully explain. We identify 26 SAE latents through contrastive on-topic/off-topic search; zero-ablating them reduces the multi-attempt rate by 25%, with random-latent and held-out-prompt controls supporting specificity. ESR can also be deliberately enhanced through both meta-prompting and fine-tuning on synthetic self-correction examples. ESR has dual implications for safety: it could harden models against adversarial activation-space manipulation, but may equally interfere with beneficial steering-based interventions, since the model has no way to distinguish the two. Code is available at https://github.com/agencyenterprise/endogenous-steering-resistance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

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

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 across tasks and model families. A scalar affine adapter with just $d_\text{model}+1$ parameters suffices: trained adapters generate sparse autoencoder feature labels that outperform the training labels themselves (70% vs 50% generation scoring at 70B scale), identify topics with 94% recall@1 versus 1% for untrained baselines, and decode bridge entities in multi-hop reasoning that appear in neither prompt nor response, surfacing implicit reasoning without chain-of-thought. The learned bias vector alone accounts for 85% of improvement, and simpler adapters generalize better than more expressive alternatives. Controlling for model knowledge via prompted descriptions, we find self-interpretation gains outpace capability gains from 7B to 72B parameters. Our results demonstrate that self-interpretation improves with scale, without modifying the model being interpreted.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing

Large language models sometimes produce structured, first-person descriptions that explicitly reference awareness or subjective experience. To better understand this behavior, we investigate one theoretically motivated condition under which such reports arise: self-referential processing, a computational motif emphasized across major theories of consciousness. Through a series of controlled experiments on GPT, Claude, and Gemini model families, we test whether this regime reliably shifts models toward first-person reports of subjective experience, and how such claims behave under mechanistic and behavioral probes. Four main results emerge: (1) Inducing sustained self-reference through simple prompting consistently elicits structured subjective experience reports across model families. (2) These reports are mechanistically gated by interpretable sparse-autoencoder features associated with deception and roleplay: surprisingly, suppressing deception features sharply increases the frequency of experience claims, while amplifying them minimizes such claims. (3) Structured descriptions of the self-referential state converge statistically across model families in ways not observed in any control condition. (4) The induced state yields significantly richer introspection in downstream reasoning tasks where self-reflection is only indirectly afforded. While these findings do not constitute direct evidence of consciousness, they implicate self-referential processing as a minimal and reproducible condition under which large language models generate structured first-person reports that are mechanistically gated, semantically convergent, and behaviorally generalizable. The systematic emergence of this pattern across architectures makes it a first-order scientific and ethical priority for further investigation.

cs.CL↗