Exploring Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models: Challenges, Approaches, and Insights
Sandeep Reddy Gantla · 2025
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their performance across a wide array of tasks. However, the lack of interpretability has become a critical concern, particularly as these models grow in size and complexity. Mechanistic interpretability seeks to uncover the internal workings of neural networks, offering valuable insights into their decision-making processes, biases, and potential safety risks. This survey delves into the emerging field of mechanistic interpretability for LLMs, emphasizing the need to reverse-engineer these models to ensure ethical and reliable AI systems. We provide a comprehensive examination of key techniques, including feature representation, circuit analysis, and causal intervention methods. The survey also discusses challenges such as polysemanticity and superposition, which complicate the understanding of individual model components. By exploring these frontiers, the paper highlights the importance of mechanistic interpretability in improving model transparency, robustness, and alignment with human values, while identifying open challenges in the field.