Francisco Ferreira da Silva

• Francisco Ferreira da Silva 23 Mar 2026 13:57 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Tim Hua’s comment on: Find­ing fea­tures in Trans­form­ers: Con­trastive di­rec­tions elicit stronger low-level per­tur­ba­tion re­sponses than baselines

  Thank you! Yes, we have. I actually generated a plot comparing steering effectiveness to perturbation response a few weeks back, but it seems LessWrong does not allow images in comments, so I’ll just describe it :) Steering effectiveness is somewhat input and concept dependent, but for the English-to-Mandarin case in Qwen3, we observe a peak of ~80% of output Mandarin tokens for a perturbation angle of ~20 degrees. This aligns quite well with the peak of the perturbation response curve; similarly, there is good alignment between the perturbation magnitude at which we start to observe changes in output and at which the perturbation response becomes non-zero.

• Francisco Ferreira da Silva 15 Mar 2026 9:45 UTC

  3 points

  2

  on: The Ar­tifi­cial Self

  The arXiv link at the top currently links to the gradual disempowerment preprint.

• Francisco Ferreira da Silva 11 Mar 2026 11:19 UTC

  7 points

  5

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Don’t Let LLMs Write For You

  I agree with this directionally, but would add a caveat to your research paper caveat. If it’s a research paper of the type ‘I ran experiment X and found Y’ then yes, I suppose the words don’t matter so much beyond conveying the result—although I’ve found Claude to have a tendency to overclaim and overinterpret results that needs to be carefully kept in check, to the extent that I often think “man it’d have been easier to write this myself!”

  But ‘I ran experiment X and found Y’ is not what every research paper is! For many research papers, I definitely care about the ideas of the author and how they convey them, so I’d rather they stay mostly LLM-free.