Can LLMs Faithfully Solve Ontology Engineering Tasks? A Mechanistic Interpretability Study

Authors: Bohui Zhang , Albert Meroño-Peñuela , Elena Simperl

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Abstract: Ontological knowledge underpins large language model (LLM) performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing evaluations of LLMs' ontological understanding largely rely on behavioral correctness, leaving the underlying mechanisms unexplained. Existing mechanistic interpretability work has largely focused on instance-level factual knowledge, leaving ontological knowledge under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce MIOE, a causal-abstraction benchmark that evaluates interchange interventions for two ontology engineering tasks: entity typing and subsumption prediction. MIOE tests whether learned internal intervention targets can change an ontology-level target answer while preserving class-specific auxiliary information. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-4B, we evaluate SAE-, DBM-, and DAS-based methods, including multi-task and multi-layer variants. Distributed subspace methods give the strongest results and generalize across prompt settings, but the induced changes remain only partially separated from auxiliary class-specific information. Multi-task objectives and contiguous layer-window interventions improve this balance, while class-level analyses reveal substantial variation across ontology classes. These results suggest that ontological predictions are mechanistically accessible in LLMs, although current methods do not yet isolate a cleanly disentangled causal mechanism for ontological knowledge.

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Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

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arXiv:2610.38326 [cs.AI]

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arXiv:2610.38326v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.38326

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From: Bohui Zhang [ view email ]

[v1]

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 06:23:58 UTC (691 KB)

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