Intrinsic Self-Correction in LLMs: Towards Explainable Prompting via Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2505.11924 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-21 · Read on arXiv

Yu-Ting Lee, Fu-Chieh Chang, Yu-En Shu, Hui-Ying Shih, Pei-Yuan Wu

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-21

Updated: 2026-08-24

Code: https://github.com/Yu-TingLee/llm-self-correction-mech-interp

Terminology

• Steering — 40× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 16× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Cosine Similarity — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Interpretability — 6× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Activation Addition — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Representation Engineering — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• alpha — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• In-Context Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Iterative Refinement — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifier — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• On the Intrinsic Self-Correction Capability of LLMs: Uncertainty and Latent Concept
• Confidence Matters: Revisiting Intrinsic Self-Correction Capabilities of Large Language Models
• Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering
• Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency
• Unveiling the Latent Directions of Reflection in Large Language Models
• Mistral 7B
• LFM2 Technical Report

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