Towards Unifying Interpretability and Control: Evaluation via Intervention

Usha Bhalla, Suraj Srinivas, Asma Ghandeharioun, Himabindu Lakkaraju

Keywords: machine learning interpretability, mechanistic interpretability

Abstract: With the growing complexity and capability of large language models (LLMs), a need to understand model reasoning has emerged, often motivated by an underlying goal of controlling and aligning models. While numerous interpretability and steering methods have been proposed as solutions, they are typically designed either for understanding or for control, seldom addressing both, with the connection between interpretation and control more broadly remaining tenuous. Additionally, the lack of standardized applications, motivations, and evaluation metrics makes it difficult to assess these methods' practical utility and efficacy. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose intervention as a fundamental goal of interpretability and introduce success criteria to evaluate how well methods are able to control model behavior through interventions. We unify and extend four popular interpretability methods—sparse autoencoders, logit lens, tuned lens, and probing—into an abstract encoder-decoder framework. This framework maps intermediate latent representations to human-interpretable feature spaces, enabling interventions on these interpretable features, which can then be mapped back to latent representations to control model outputs. We introduce two new evaluation metrics: intervention success rate and the coherence-intervention tradeoff, designed to measure the accuracy of explanations and their utility in controlling model behavior. Our findings reveal that (1) although current methods allow for intervention, they are inconsistent across various models and features, (2) lens-based methods outperform others in achieving simple, concrete interventions, and (3) interventions often compromise model performance and coherence, underperforming simpler alternatives, such as prompting, for steering model behavior and highlighting a critical shortcoming of current interpretability approaches in real-world applications requiring control. Code is made available for replicability.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

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Submission Number: 11789