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Xeno-Interpretability: Investigating the Alien Minds of LLMs

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 17, 2026 · UTC

Large language models are usually interpreted through concepts that humans already possess: truthfulness, refusal, deception, personality, harmfulness, and related categories. This paper asks whether models may also represent and use distinctions for which no adequate human concept exists. We call such internal structures xeno-representations, and their study xeno-interpretability. We distinguish the human-interpretable semantic space from the xeno-semantic space: the region of model-native representations for which no adequate human conceptual counterpart is available. We show that the space

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