Xeno-Interpretability: Investigating the Alien Minds of LLMs
Large language models are usually interpreted through concepts that humans already possess: truthfulness, refusal, deception, personality, harmfulness, and related categories. This paper asks whether models may also represent and use distinctions for which no adequate human concept exists. We call such internal structures xeno-representations, and their study xeno-interpretability. We distinguish the human-interpretable semantic space from the xeno-semantic space: the region of model-native representations for which no adequate human conceptual counterpart is available. We show that the space of possible internal distinctions in an LLM is substantially larger than the space available thro...
| Authors | F. Pierucci, M. Bracale Syrnikov, M. Prandi et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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