Alireza Bayat Makou
Author directory2026
Murano: Design, Run, and Reproduce Mechanistic Interpretability Experiments as Composable Pipelines
Alireza Bayat Makou | Emirhan Böge | Phu Gia Hoang | Federico Tiblias | Jingcheng Niu | Subhabrata Dutta | Richard Eckart de Castilho | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Alireza Bayat Makou | Emirhan Böge | Phu Gia Hoang | Federico Tiblias | Jingcheng Niu | Subhabrata Dutta | Richard Eckart de Castilho | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
This paper presents Murano, an open source framework for designing, running, and reproducing mechanistic interpretability studies of large language models, intended for researchers across disciplines. These studies often combine loading, recording, attribution, intervention, and evaluation, while existing libraries tend to focus on different parts of this workflow. As a result, researchers using several libraries may need to adapt outputs from one for use by another. To bridge this gap, Murano represents operations from these five areas as composable steps. Steps exchange named result artifacts and declare the inputs they require and the outputs they produce. A pipeline executes its steps in the order supplied, and Murano uses canonical addresses when component identities pass between operations. Murano builds on existing interpretability and machine learning libraries. We demonstrate Murano through two reproductions of established interpretability studies and one illustrative sparse autoencoder case study.
2024
LLM-based Rewriting of Inappropriate Argumentation using Reinforcement Learning from Machine Feedback
Timon Ziegenbein | Gabriella Skitalinskaya | Alireza Bayat Makou | Henning Wachsmuth
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Timon Ziegenbein | Gabriella Skitalinskaya | Alireza Bayat Makou | Henning Wachsmuth
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ensuring that online discussions are civil and productive is a major challenge for social media platforms. Such platforms usually rely both on users and on automated detection tools to flag inappropriate arguments of other users, which moderators then review. However, this kind of post-hoc moderation is expensive and time-consuming, and moderators are often overwhelmed by the amount and severity of flagged content. Instead, a promising alternative is to prevent negative behavior during content creation. This paper studies how inappropriate language in arguments can be computationally mitigated. We propose a reinforcement learning-based rewriting approach that balances content preservation and appropriateness based on existing classifiers, prompting an instruction-finetuned large language model (LLM) as our initial policy. Unlike related style transfer tasks, rewriting inappropriate arguments allows deleting and adding content permanently. It is therefore tackled on document level rather than sentence level. We evaluate different weighting schemes for the reward function in both absolute and relative human assessment studies. Systematic experiments on non-parallel data provide evidence that our approach can mitigate the inappropriateness of arguments while largely preserving their content. It significantly outperforms competitive baselines, including few-shot learning, prompting, and humans.