Yutong Gao, Qinglin Meng Purdue University, Yuan Zhou Purdue University, Liangming Pan Peking University
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across many NLP tasks, their opaque internal mechanisms hinder trustworthiness and safe deployment. Existing surveys in explainable AI largely focus on post-hoc explanation methods that interpret trained models through external approximations. In contrast, intrinsic interpretability, which builds transparency directly into model architectures and computations, has recently emerged as a promising alternative. This paper presents a systematic review of the recent advances in intrinsic interpretability for LLMs, categorizing existing approaches into five design paradigms: functional transparency, concept alignment, representational decomposability, explicit modularization, and latent sparsity induction. We further discuss open challenges and outline future research directions in this emerging field. The paper list is available at: Survey-Intrinsic-Interpretability-of-LLMs
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Reinforcement learning (RL) has catalyzed the emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that have pushed reasoning capabilities to new heights. While their performance has garnered significant excitement, exploring the internal mechanisms driving these behaviors has become an equally critical research frontier. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the mechanistic understanding of LRMs, organizing recent findings into three core dimensions: 1) training dynamics, 2) reasoning mechanisms, and 3) unintended behaviors. By synthesizing these insights, we aim to bridge the gap between black-box performance and mechanistic transparency. Finally, we discuss under-explored challenges to outline a roadmap for future mechanistic studies, including the need for applied interpretability, improved methodologies, and a unified theoretical framework.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xunjian Yin Duke University, Sitao Cheng, Yuxi Xie, Xinyu Hu, Li Lin, Xinyi Wang Princeton University, Liangming Pan Peking University, William Yang Wang 等 9 位作者
Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right. We explore the complementary factorization, training right-to-left at scale, and ask what reasoning patterns emerge when a model conditions on future context to predict the past.We train LEDOM, an open-source purely reverse autoregressive language model (2B/7B parameters, 435B tokens), and find it develops capabilities distinct from forward models, including abductive inference, question synthesis, and structural handling of the reversal curse.We then explore one application of the reverse model: combining forward likelihood P(y \mid x) with reverse posterior P(x \mid y) through noisy channel duality. We propose Reverse Reward, which reranks forward outputs using reverse posterior estimates, and prove that bidirectional scoring penalizes hallucinated reasoning chains whose backward reconstruction degrades.Reverse Reward yields gains of up to 6.6% on AIME 2024 and 15% on AMC 2023 across multiple strong baselines. We release all codes at https://github.com/Arvid-pku/LEDOM.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表