MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark

2026-09-11

AI Summary

本文引入MAxBench框架，通过对比多种方法来解决多分类概念表示的恢复问题，揭示了不同几何类型在概念控制中的有效性。

Abstract

Fine-grained control of language model behaviors (e.g., steering) is among the more actionable outcomes of interpretability research. For binary concepts such as refusal, a single direction in activation space often suffices for steering. However, many concepts are not binary: Animals and Countries contain many subcategories, each with multiple instances. For these concepts, the search space over possible representation geometries is far larger than for binary concepts; it is thus not clear what geometries are most appropriate, nor what methods are most effective at recovering them. In this work, we introduce MAxBench, a geometry-agnostic evaluation framework for multinomial concept representations based on sampling from the recovered concept representation. We use MAxBench to compare 10 localization methods (covering 5 geometry types) across 6 concepts and 4 models. Using this framework, we find that (i) affine subspaces steer more reliably and have greater recall than rank-one or linear subspaces; (ii) much of this advantage is due to better non-zero offsets rather than the choice of bases; (iii) manifold steering is competitive with the best methods when applicable; and (iv) no method consistently outperforms prompting, in alignment with prior findings on binary concepts. These findings underscore the importance of expanding the scope of interpretability research and meta-evaluation to concepts with more varied structure.

Problem

• multinomial concept
• representation geometry
• concept recovery
• activation space

Innovation

• MAxBench
• multinomial concept representations
• geometry-agnostic evaluation
• affine subspaces
• manifold steering