When Does Correction Become Repair? Mechanistic Auditing of Internal Interventions in Tool-Using LLMs
Before invoking external tools, an agentic LLM must select among a K-way action space: executing a call, seeking clarification, answering directly, or declining. While internal activation steering can alter these pre-execution decisions, conventional aggregate metrics obscure where altered states land and what collateral damage they inflict. We present SAKIKO, an auditing framework that formalizes representation repair via directional error discovery, router-conditioned intervention, destination-resolved verification, and prospectively frozen statistical licensing. Across seven LLMs on When2Call and MetaTool, channel-keyed interventions induce direction-specific net gains in five models; ...
| Authors | Jiayi Li, Ruizhe Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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