Activation-Guided Neuron Intervention to Induce Alzheimer's-Related Computational Language Phenotypes in a Large Language Model
Changes in spontaneous speech provide an early signal of cognitive dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD) that large language models (LLMs) can detect. However, detection alone cannot establish whether the underlying model representations contribute functionally to behavior. We introduce an activation-guided intervention framework using Qwen3-8B. The framework identifies feed-forward neurons with higher activation rates for AD than control transcripts and modulates their output contributions during generation by scaling the corresponding down-projection weights. This yielded nine edited variants differing in intervention direction, magnitude, and scope. The original and edited models com...
| Authors | Rui He, Ercong Nie, Hong Jiang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.