From Theory to Practice: Successful start of our workshop series

Last week, we kicked off our "BLISS x dida" workshop series. What started as an idea to bridge the gap between AI research and industry practice turned into a packed room of over 90 curious minds at TU Berlin.

A big thank you to Reduan Achtibat from Fraunhofer HHI for leading our first session: "Opening the Black Box with LRP." Reduan took us on a deep dive into Explainable AI (XAI) for LLMs. In a world where LLMs are often seen as black boxes, sessions like these are vital for building safe, faithful, and steerable AI systems.

Key takeaways for the participants of our live-coding session:

• Tracing reasoning from tokens to predictions using LRP
• Identifying how specific attention heads retrieve information during in-context learning
• Intervening in latent representations to steer generation

Understanding why an LLM makes a decision is just as important as the decision itself.

This was a fantastic first session of our workshop series. Stay tuned for the next session, which will already follow in the next weeks!