Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has emerged as a vital approach to demystify the opaque decision-making of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing reviews primarily treat MI as an observational science, summarizing analytical insights while lacking a systematic framework for actionable intervention. To bridge this gap, we present a practical survey structured around the pipeline: "Locate, Steer, and Improve." We formally categorize Localizing (diagnosis) and Steering (intervention) methods based on specific Interpretable Objects to establish a rigorous intervention protocol. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency, effectively operationalizing MI as an actionable methodology for model optimization. The curated paper list of this work is available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/Awesome-Actionable-MI-Survey.
Zhiyuan Hu, Yucheng Wang +8
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks, yet it often suffers from exploration collapse: poli...
Zanlin Ni, Shenzhi Wang +9
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution sp...
Sungrae Park, Sanghoon Kim +35
We introduce Solar Open, a 102B-parameter bilingual Mixture-of-Experts language model for underserved languages. Solar Open demonstrates a systematic methodology for building competitive LLMs by addre...
Shaotian Yan, Kaiyuan Liu +7
In this report, we introduce DASD-4B-Thinking, a lightweight yet highly capable, fully open-source reasoning model. It achieves SOTA performance among open-source models of comparable scale across cha...
Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao +7
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in reasoning-intensive domains like mathematics. However, optimizing open-ended generation remains challenging due...
