Interpretability is a key challenge in fostering trust for Large Language Models (LLMs), which stems from the complexity of extracting reasoning from a model’s parameters. We present the Frame Representation Hypothesis, a theoretically robust framework grounded in the Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH) to interpret and control LLMs by modeling multi-token words. Prior research explored LRH to connect LLM representations with linguistic concepts, but was limited to single token analysis. As most words are composed of several tokens, we extend LRH to multi-token words, thereby enabling usage on any textual data with thousands of concepts. To this end, we propose that words can be interpreted as frames, ordered sequences of vectors that better capture token-word relationships. Then, concepts can be represented as the average of word frames sharing a common concept. We showcase these tools through Top-k Concept-Guided Decoding, which can intuitively steer text generation using concepts of choice. We verify said ideas on Llama 3, Gemma 2, Phi 3, and Qwen-2-VL families, demonstrating gender and language biases, exposing harmful content, but also potential to remediate them, leading to safer and more transparent LLMs. Code is available at this https url.

Comedy serves as a profound reflection of the times we live in and is a staple element of human interactions. In light of the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), the intersection of humor and AI has become no laughing matter. Advancements in the naturalness of human-computer interaction correlates with improvements in AI systems’ abilities to understand humor. In this study, we assess the ability of models in accurately identifying humorous quotes from a stand-up comedy transcript. Stand-up comedy’s unique comedic narratives make it an ideal dataset to improve the overall naturalness of comedic understanding. We propose a novel humor detection metric designed to evaluate LLMs amongst various prompts on their capability to extract humorous punchlines. The metric has a modular structure that offers three different scoring methods - fuzzy string matching, sentence embedding, and subspace similarity - to provide an overarching assessment of a model’s performance. The model’s results are compared against those of human evaluators on the same task. Our metric reveals that regardless of prompt engineering, leading models, ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek, achieve scores of at most 51% in humor detection. Notably, this performance surpasses that of humans who achieve a score of 41%. The analysis of human evaluators and LLMs reveals variability in agreement, highlighting the subjectivity inherent in humor and the complexities involved in extracting humorous quotes from live performance transcripts.