China

Mechanistic interpretability research faces a gap between analyzing simple circuits in toy tasks and discovering features in large models. To bridge this gap, we propose text-to-SQL generation as an ideal task to study, as it combines the formal structure of toy tasks with real-world complexity. We introduce TinySQL, a synthetic dataset, progressing from basic to advanced SQL operations, and train models ranging from 33M to 1B parameters to establish a comprehensive testbed for interpretability. We apply multiple complementary interpretability techniques, including Edge Attribution Patching and Sparse Autoencoders, to identify minimal circuits and components supporting SQL generation. We compare circuits for different SQL subskills, evaluating their minimality, reliability, and identifiability. Finally, we conduct a layerwise logit lens analysis to reveal how models compose SQL queries across layers: from intent recognition to schema resolution to structured generation. Our work provides a robust framework for probing and comparing interpretability methods in a structured, progressively complex setting.

EMNLP 2025

TinySQL: A Progressive Text-to-SQL Dataset for Mechanistic Interpretability Research

data influence

mechanistic interpretability

text-to-sql

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

poster

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are commonly used to provide plausible free-text explanations of a model's reasoning about its predictions. However, recent work has questioned their faithfulness, as they may not accurately reflect the model’s internal reasoning process regarding its predicted answer. In contrast, highlight explanations--input fragments critical for the model's predicted answers--exhibit measurable faithfulness. Building on this foundation, we propose G-Tex, a Graph-Guided Textual Explanation Generation framework designed to enhance the faithfulness of NLEs. Specifically, highlight explanations are first extracted as faithful cues reflecting the model's reasoning logic toward answer prediction. They are subsequently encoded through a graph neural network layer to guide the NLE generation, which aligns the generated explanations with the model’s underlying reasoning toward the predicted answer. Experiments on T5 and BART using three reasoning datasets show that G-Tex improves NLE faithfulness by up to 12.18% compared to baseline methods. Additionally, G-Tex generates NLEs with greater semantic and lexical similarity to human-written ones. Human evaluations show that G-Tex can decrease redundant content and enhance the overall quality of NLEs. Our work presents a novel method for explicitly guiding NLE generation to enhance faithfulness, serving as a foundation for addressing broader criteria in NLE and generated text.

Graph-Guided Textual Explanation Generation Framework

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to validate their output and identify potential errors is crucial for ensuring robustness and reliability. However, current research indicates that LLMs struggle with self-correction, encountering significant challenges in detecting errors. While studies have explored methods to enhance self-correction in LLMs, relatively little attention has been given to understanding the models' internal mechanisms underlying error detection. In this paper, we present a mechanistic analysis of error detection in LLMs, focusing on simple arithmetic problems. Through circuit analysis, we identify the computational subgraphs responsible for detecting arithmetic errors across four smaller-sized LLMs. Our findings reveal that all models heavily rely on textitconsistency headstextemdashattention heads that assess surface-level alignment of numerical values in arithmetic solutions. Moreover, we observe that the models' internal arithmetic computation primarily occurs in higher layers, whereas validation takes place in middle layers, before the final arithmetic results are fully encoded. This structural dissociation between arithmetic computation and validation seems to explain why smaller-sized LLMs struggle to detect even simple arithmetic errors.

The Validation Gap: A Mechanistic Analysis of How Language Models Compute Arithmetic but Fail to Validate It

We investigate whether large language models encode latent knowledge of frame semantics, focusing on frame identification—a core challenge in Frame Semantic Parsing that involves selecting the appropriate semantic frame for a target word in context. Using the FrameNet lexical resource, we evaluate models under prompt-based inference and observe that they can perform frame disambiguation effectively even without explicit supervision. To assess the impact of task-specific training, we fine tune the model on FrameNet data and fine tuning substantially improves in-domain accuracy while generalizing well to out-of-domain benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that the model can generate semantically coherent frame definitions and remains partially robust to corrupted frame labels, suggesting an internalized understanding of frame semantics beyond surface cues.

Do LLMs Encode Frame Semantics? Evidence from Frame Identification

Safety fine-tuning algorithms reduce harmful outputs in language models, yet their mechanisms remain under-explored. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular choice of algorithm, but prior explanations—attributing its effects solely to dampened toxic neurons in the MLP layers—are incomplete. In this study, we analyse four language models (Llama-3.1-8B, Gemma-2-2B, Mistral-7B, GPT-2-Medium) and show that toxic neurons only account for 2.5% to 24% of DPO's effects across models. Instead, DPO induces distributed activation shifts across all MLP neurons to create a net toxicity reduction. We attribute this reduction to four neuron groups—two aligned with reducing toxicity and two promoting anti-toxicity—whose combined effects replicate DPO across models. To further validate this understanding, we develop an activation editing method that mimics DPO through distributed shifts along a toxicity representation. This method outperforms DPO in reducing toxicity while preserving perplexity, without requiring any weight updates. Our work provides a mechanistic understanding of DPO and introduces an efficient, tuning-free alternative for safety fine-tuning.

How Does DPO Reduce Toxicity? A Mechanistic Neuron-Level Analysis

A critical component in the trustworthiness of LLMs is reliable uncertainty communication, yet LLMs often use assertive language when conveying false claims, leading to over-reliance and eroded trust. We present the first systematic study of _faithful confidence calibration_ of LLMs, benchmarking models' ability to use linguistic expressions of uncertainty that _faithfully reflect_ their intrinsic uncertainty, across a comprehensive array of models, datasets, and prompting strategies. Our results demonstrate that LLMs largely fail at this task, and that existing interventions are insufficient: standard prompt approaches provide only marginal gains, and existing, factuality-based calibration techniques can even harm faithful calibration. To address this critical gap, we introduce MetaFaith, a novel prompt-based calibration approach inspired by human metacognition. We show that MetaFaith robustly improves faithful calibration across diverse models and task domains, enabling up to 61% improvement in faithfulness and achieving an 83% win rate over original generations as judged by humans.

MetaFaith: Faithful Natural Language Uncertainty Expression in LLMs

One of the core goals of crisis counseling services is to support emotional de-escalation of the individual in crisis, by reducing intense negative emotional affect and emotional dysregulation. The science of crisis intervention has been impeded, however, by a lack of quantitative approaches that allow for detailed analysis of emotion in crisis conversations. In order to measure de-escalation at scale (millions of text-based conversations), lightweight models are needed that can assign not just binary sentiment predictions but quantitative scores to capture graded change in emotional valence. Accordingly, we developed a transformer-based emotional valence scoring model fit for crisis conversations, BERT-EV, that assigns numerical emotional valence scores to rate the intensity of expressed negative versus positive emotion. This transformer-based model can run on modest hardware configurations, allowing it to scale affordably and efficiently to a massive corpus of crisis conversations. We evaluated model performance on a corpus of hand-scored social media messages, and found that BERT-EV outperforms existing dictionary-based standard tools in the field, as well as other transformer-based implementations and an LLM in accurately matching scores from human annotators. Finally, we show that trends in these emotional valence scores can be used to assess emotional de-escalation during crisis conversations, with sufficient turn-by-turn granularity to help identify helpful vs. detrimental crisis counselor statements.

Assessing effective de-escalation of crisis conversations using transformer-based models and trend statistics

Hallucination remains a critical failure mode of large language models (LLMs), undermining their trustworthiness in real-world applications. In this work, we focus on confabulation, a foundational aspect of hallucination where the model fabricates facts about unknown entities. We introduce a targeted dataset designed to isolate and analyze this behavior across diverse prompt types. Using this dataset, and building on recent progress in interpreting LLM internals, we extract latent directions associated with confabulation using sparse projections. A simple vector-based steering method demonstrates that these directions can modulate model behavior with minimal disruption, shedding light on the inner representations that drive factual and non-factual output. Our findings contribute to a deeper mechanistic understanding of LLMs and pave the way toward more trustworthy and controllable generation. We release the code and dataset at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Confabulation-discovery.

Where Confabulation Lives: Latent Feature Discovery in LLMs

Recent work has demonstrated that using chain of thought (CoT), on soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning, often yields limited or even negative performance gains. CoT can also be unfaithful to the model’s actual reasoning. This paper investigates dynamics and unfaithfulness of CoT in soft-reasoning tasks across instruction-tuned, reasoning and reasoning-distilled models. Our findings show that distilled‑reasoning models rely heavily on CoT for these tasks, while instruction‑tuned and reasoning models often use it post‑hoc. Additionally, we find that CoT can steer model predictions without faithfully reflecting reasoning, indicating a disconnect between CoT influence and faithfulness.

Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?

Reasoning over temporal and numerical data, such as time series, is a crucial aspect of fact-checking. While many systems have recently been developed to handle this form of evidence, their evaluation remains limited by existing datasets, which often lack structured evidence, provide insufficient justifications for verdicts, or rely on synthetic claims. In this paper, we introduce TSVer, a new benchmark dataset for fact verification focusing on temporal and numerical reasoning with time-series evidence. TSVer contains 287 real-world claims sourced from 25 fact-checking organizations and a curated database of 152 time series covering diverse domains. Each claim is annotated with time frames across all pertinent time series, along with a verdict and justifications reflecting how the evidence is used to reach the verdict. Using an LLM-assisted multi-step annotation process, we improve the quality of our annotations and achieve an inter-annotator agreement of 0.709 on verdicts. We also develop a baseline for verifying claims against time-series evidence and show that even the state-of-the-art reasoning models like Gemini-2.5-Pro are challenged by time series, achieving a 63.37 accuracy score on verdicts and an Ev2R score of 48.63 on verdict justifications.

TSVer: A Benchmark for Fact Verification Against Time-Series Evidence

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potential for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze SAE for interpretable feature extraction from LLMs in safety-critical classification tasks. Our framework evaluates (1) model-layer selection and scaling properties, (2) SAE architectural configurations, including width and pooling strategies, and (3) the effect of binarizing continuous SAE activations. SAE-derived features achieve macro F1 > 0.8, outperforming hidden-state and BoW baselines while demonstrating cross-model transfer from Gemma 2 2B to 9B-IT models. These features generalize in a zero-shot manner to cross-lingual toxicity detection and visual classification tasks. Our analysis highlights the significant impact of pooling strategies and binarization thresholds, showing that binarization offers an efficient alternative to traditional feature selection while maintaining or improving performance. These findings establish new best practices for SAE-based interpretability and enable scalable, transparent deployment of LLMs in real-world applications.

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