MechELK: A Mechanistic Interpretability Framework for Eliciting Latent Knowledge in Large Language Models
arXiv:2605.28825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) frequently encode factual and reasoning knowledge in their internal representations that is not faithfully reflected in their surface-level outputs — a phenomenon known as emph{latent knowledge}. Existing approaches to eliciting latent knowledge, such as Contrastive Consistency Search (CCS), rely on contrastive activation patterns and struggle with complex multi-step reasoning tasks, while mechanistic interpretability tools have primarily been used to emph{understand} model behavior rather than to emph{extract} hidden knowledge. We […]