LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers” by Sam Marks, Adam Karvonen, James Chua, Subhash Kantamneni, Euan Ong, Julian Minder, Clément Dumas, Owain_Evans

18 Dec 2025

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TL;DR: We train LLMs to accept LLM neural activations as inputs and answer arbitrary questions about them in natural language. These Activation Oracles generalize far beyond their training distribution, for example uncovering misalignment or secret knowledge introduced via fine-tuning. Activation Oracles can be improved simply by scaling training data quantity and diversity. The below is a reproduction of our X thread on this paper and the Anthropic Alignment blog post. Thread New paper: We train Activation Oracles: LLMs that decode their own neural activations and answer questions about them in natural language. We find surprising generalization. For instance, our AOs uncover misaligned goals in fine-tuned models, without training to do so. We aim to make a general-purpose LLM for explaining activations by: 1. Training on a diverse set of tasks 2. Evaluating on tasks very different from training This extends prior work (LatentQA) that studied activation verbalization in narrow settings. Our main evaluations are downstream auditing tasks. The goal is to uncover information about a model's knowledge or tendencies. Applying Activation Oracles is easy. Choose the activation (or set of activations) you want to interpret and ask any question you like! We [...] ---Outline:(00:46) Thread(04:49) Blog post(05:27) Introduction(07:29) Method(10:15) Activation Oracles generalize to downstream auditing tasks(13:47) How does Activation Oracle training scale?(15:01) How do Activation Oracles relate to mechanistic approaches to interpretability?(19:31) Conclusion The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: December 18th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rwoEz3bA9ekxkabc7/activation-oracles-training-and-evaluating-llms-as-general --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

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13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

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2ª PARTE | 06 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

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El Partidazo de COPE

3ª PARTE | 22 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

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3ª PARTE | 04 MAR 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

01 Jan 1970

El Partidazo de COPE

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LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers” by Sam Marks, Adam Karvonen, James Chua, Subhash Kantamneni, Euan Ong, Julian Minder, Clément Dumas, Owain_Evans

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

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13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

2ª PARTE | 06 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

3ª PARTE | 22 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

3ª PARTE | 04 MAR 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

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