English

Causally Grounded Mechanistic Interpretability for LLMs with Faithful Natural-Language Explanations

Computation and Language 2026-03-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Mechanistic interpretability identifies internal circuits responsible for model behaviors, yet translating these findings into human-understandable explanations remains an open problem. We present a pipeline that bridges circuit-level analysis and natural language explanations by (i) identifying causally important attention heads via activation patching, (ii) generating explanations using both template-based and LLM-based methods, and (iii) evaluating faithfulness using ERASER-style metrics adapted for circuit-level attribution. We evaluate on the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task in GPT-2 Small (124M parameters), identifying six attention heads accounting for 61.4% of the logit difference. Our circuit-based explanations achieve 100% sufficiency but only 22% comprehensiveness, revealing distributed backup mechanisms. LLM-generated explanations outperform template baselines by 64% on quality metrics. We find no correlation (r = 0.009) between model confidence and explanation faithfulness, and identify three failure categories explaining when explanations diverge from mechanisms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.09988,
  title  = {Causally Grounded Mechanistic Interpretability for LLMs with Faithful Natural-Language Explanations},
  author = {Ajay Pravin Mahale},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09988},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. MSc thesis work conducted at Hochschule Trier (2026). Code will be released upon publication