Ely Hahami

Ely Hahami, Ishaan Sinha, Lavik Jain et al.

Can large language models introspect, that is, accurately detect perturbations to their own internal states? We systematically investigate this question using activation steering in Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. First, we show that the binary detection paradigm used in prior work conflates introspection with a methodological artifact: apparent detection accuracy is entirely explained by global logit shifts that bias models toward affirmative responses regardless of question content. However, on tasks requiring differential sensitivity, we find robust evidence for partial introspection: models localize which of 10 sentences received an injection at up to 88\% accuracy (vs.\ 10\% chance) and discriminate relative injection strengths at 83\% accuracy (vs.\ 50\% chance). These capabilities are confined to early-layer injections and collapse to chance thereafter -- a pattern we explain mechanistically through attention-based signal routing and residual stream recovery dynamics. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can compute meaningful functions over perturbations to their internal states, establishing introspection as a real but layer-dependent phenomenon that merits further investigation. Our code is open-sourced here: https://github.com/elyhahami18/llama-introspection-new

Xu Pan, Ely Hahami, Zechen Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently struggle to sequentially add new memories and integrate new knowledge. These limitations contrast with the human ability to continuously learn from new experiences and acquire knowledge throughout life. Most existing approaches add memories either through large context windows or external memory buffers (e.g., Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and studies on knowledge injection rarely test scenarios resembling everyday life events. In this work, we introduce a continual learning framework, Memory Embedded in Gated LLMs (MEGa), which injects event memories directly into the weights of LLMs. Each memory is stored in a dedicated set of gated low-rank weights. During inference, a gating mechanism activates relevant memory weights by matching query embeddings to stored memory embeddings. This enables the model to both recall entire memories and answer related questions. On two datasets - fictional characters and Wikipedia events - MEGa outperforms baseline approaches in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our model draws inspiration from the complementary memory system of the human brain.

Xu Pan, Ely Hahami, Jingxuan Fan et al.

Despite autoregressive large language models (arLLMs) being the current dominant paradigm in language modeling, they resist knowledge injection via fine-tuning due to inherent shortcomings such as the "reversal curse" -- the challenge of answering questions that reverse the original information order in the training sample. Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful alternative to the arLLM paradigm, with evidence of better data efficiency and free of the "reversal curse" in pre-training. However, it is unknown whether these advantages extend to the post-training phase, i.e. whether pre-trained dLLMs can easily acquire new knowledge through fine-tuning. On three diverse datasets, we fine-tune arLLMs and dLLMs, evaluating them with forward and backward style Question Answering (QA) to probe knowledge generalization and the reversal curse. Our results confirm that arLLMs critically rely on extensive data augmentation via paraphrases for QA generalization, and paraphrases are only effective when their information order matches the QA style. Conversely, dLLMs achieve high accuracies on both forward and backward QAs without paraphrases; adding paraphrases yields only marginal gains. Lastly, inspired by the dLLM's performance, we introduce a novel masked fine-tuning paradigm for knowledge injection into pre-trained arLLMs. This proposed method successfully and drastically improves the data efficiency of arLLM fine-tuning, effectively closing the performance gap with dLLMs.

Xu Pan, Jingxuan Fan, Zidi Xiong et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can bias towards relying on their own or the user's information in chat history, leading to overly stubborn or agreeable behaviors in multi-turn conversations. In this paper, we formalize this model characteristic as user-assistant bias and introduce an 8k multi-turn conversation dataset $\textbf{UserAssist}$, which we use to benchmark, understand and manipulate the user-assistant bias in frontier LLMs. Leveraging $\textbf{UserAssist-test}$, we first benchmark the user-assistant bias of 26 commercial and 26 open-weight models. Commercial models show various levels of user bias. Evaluation on open-weight models reveals significant user bias in the instruction-tuned models, and weak user bias in reasoning (or reasoning-distilled) models. We then perform controlled fine-tuning experiments to pinpoint the post-training recipe contributing to these bias shifts: human preference alignment increases user bias, while training on chain-of-thought reasoning traces decreases it. Finally, we demonstrate that user-assistant bias can be bidirectionally adjusted by performing direct preference optimization (DPO) on $\textbf{UserAssist-train}$, and generalizes well to both in-domain and out-of-domain conversations. Our results provide insights into how the LLM integrates information from different sources, and also a viable way to detect and control model abnormalities.