Scaling Inherently Interpretable Language Models
arXiv:2608.07594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interpretability is often treated as a tax on capability: language models are trained as opaque systems, then explained after the fact, with methods whose reliability is difficult to establish. In this work, we challenge this premise. Rather than reverse-engineering a model, we make interpretability a constraint of the training pipeline, optimized alongside the language modeling objective. Across three orders of magnitude of compute, on both autoregressive and diffusion language models, interpretability scales with capability rather than against it. Surprisingly, model representations become more disentangled and aligned with human-understandable concepts with scale. We instantiate the training-time recipe with Steerling-8B, a diffusion language model with a causal attention mask. For any group of generated tokens, Steerling-8B attributes the output to relevant input tokens, human-understandable concepts, and training data. This enables closed-loop intervention: diagnose an output through its concept or feature attribution, retrieve similar training data, and correct the behavior through concept steering without retraining. Steerling-8B remains competitive with open peer models trained on substantially 2-16x more compute, suggesting a different scaling paradigm: interpretability can be designed into training, and it improves with scale.
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[Submitted on 6 Aug 2026]
Title:Scaling Inherently Interpretable Language Models
View a PDF of the paper titled Scaling Inherently Interpretable Language Models, by Guide Labs Team and 9 other authors
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Abstract:Interpretability is often treated as a tax on capability: language models are trained as opaque systems, then explained after the fact, with methods whose reliability is difficult to establish. In this work, we challenge this premise. Rather than reverse-engineering a model, we make interpretability a constraint of the training pipeline, optimized alongside the language modeling objective. Across three orders of magnitude of compute, on both autoregressive and diffusion language models, interpretability scales with capability rather than against it. Surprisingly, model representations become more disentangled and aligned with human-understandable concepts with scale.
We instantiate the training-time recipe with Steerling-8B, a diffusion language model with a causal attention mask. For any group of generated tokens, Steerling-8B attributes the output to relevant input tokens, human-understandable concepts, and training data. This enables closed-loop intervention: diagnose an output through its concept or feature attribution, retrieve similar training data, and correct the behavior through concept steering without retraining. Steerling-8B remains competitive with open peer models trained on substantially 2-16x more compute, suggesting a different scaling paradigm: interpretability can be designed into training, and it improves with scale.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.07594 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.07594v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.07594
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Aya Abdelsalam Ismail [view email] [v1] Thu, 6 Aug 2026 04:29:58 UTC (12,100 KB)
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