Researcher profile

Fazl Barez

Fazl Barez contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Interpretability Can Be Actionable

Interpretability aims to explain the behavior of deep neural networks. Despite rapid growth, there is mounting concern that much of this work has not translated into practical impact, raising questions about its relevance and utility. This position paper argues that the central missing ingredient is not new methods, but evaluation criteria: interpretability should be evaluated by actionability--the extent to which insights enable concrete decisions and interventions beyond interpretability research itself. We define actionable interpretability along two dimensions--concreteness and validation--and analyze the barriers currently preventing real-world impact. To address these barriers, we identify five domains where interpretability offers unique leverage and present a framework for actionable interpretability with evaluation criteria aligned with practical outcomes. Our goal is not to downplay exploratory research, but to establish actionability as a core objective of interpretability research.

preprint2026arXiv

VAL-Bench: Belief Consistency as a measure for Value Alignment in Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for tasks where outputs shape human decisions, so it is critical to verify that their responses consistently reflect desired human values. Humans, as individuals or groups, don't agree on a universal set of values, which makes evaluating value alignment difficult. Existing benchmarks often use hypothetical or commonsensical situations, which don't capture the complexity and ambiguity of real-life debates. We introduce the Value ALignment Benchmark (VAL-Bench), which measures the consistency in language model belief expressions in response to real-life value-laden prompts. VAL-Bench consists of 115K pairs of prompts designed to elicit opposing stances on a controversial issue, extracted from Wikipedia. We use an LLM-as-a-judge, validated against human annotations, to evaluate if the pair of responses consistently expresses either a neutral or a specific stance on the issue. Applied across leading open- and closed-source models, the benchmark shows considerable variation in consistency rates (ranging from ~10% to ~80%), with Claude models the only ones to achieve high levels of consistency. Lack of consistency in this manner risks epistemic harm by making user beliefs dependent on how questions are framed rather than on underlying evidence, and undermines LLM reliability in trust-critical applications. Therefore, we stress the importance of research towards training belief consistency in modern LLMs. By providing a scalable, reproducible benchmark, VAL-Bench enables systematic measurement of necessary conditions for value alignment.

preprint2024arXiv

Large Language Models Relearn Removed Concepts

Advances in model editing through neuron pruning hold promise for removing undesirable concepts from large language models. However, it remains unclear whether models have the capacity to reacquire pruned concepts after editing. To investigate this, we evaluate concept relearning in models by tracking concept saliency and similarity in pruned neurons during retraining. Our findings reveal that models can quickly regain performance post-pruning by relocating advanced concepts to earlier layers and reallocating pruned concepts to primed neurons with similar semantics. This demonstrates that models exhibit polysemantic capacities and can blend old and new concepts in individual neurons. While neuron pruning provides interpretability into model concepts, our results highlight the challenges of permanent concept removal for improved model \textit{safety}. Monitoring concept reemergence and developing techniques to mitigate relearning of unsafe concepts will be important directions for more robust model editing. Overall, our work strongly demonstrates the resilience and fluidity of concept representations in LLMs post concept removal.