InverseScope: Scalable Activation Inversion for Interpreting Large Language Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission14938 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Models, mechanism interpretability, feature interpretability

Abstract: Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) is a central challenge in interpretability research. Existing feature interpretability methods often rely on strong assumptions about the structure of representations that may not hold in practice. In this work, we introduce InverseScope, an assumption-light and scalable framework for interpreting neural activations via input inversion. Given a target activation, we define a distribution over inputs that generate similar activations and analyze this distribution to infer the encoded information. To address the inefficiency of sampling in high-dimensional spaces, we propose a novel conditional generation architecture that significantly improves sample efficiency compared to previous method. We further introduce a quantitative evaluation protocol that tests interpretability hypotheses using feature consistency rate computed over the sampled inputs. InverseScope scales inversion-based interpretability methods to larger models and practical tasks, enabling systematic and quantitative analysis of internal representations in real-world LLMs.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 14938