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Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the inner workings of large neural networks by identifying circuits, or minimal subgraphs within the model that implement algorithms responsible for performing specific tasks. These circuits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Jatin Nainani , Sankaran Vaidyanathan , AJ Yeung , Kartik Gupta , David Jensen

Transformer-based language models (LMs) can perform a wide range of tasks, and mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to reverse engineer the components responsible for task completion to understand their behavior. Previous MI research has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Karim Saraipour , Shichang Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Ajay Pravin Mahale

Large Language Models such as GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a broad spectrum of applications. Nevertheless, due to their intrinsic complexity, these models present substantial challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Ashkan Golgoon , Khashayar Filom , Arjun Ravi Kannan

Transformer-based language models are treated as black-boxes because of their large number of parameters and complex internal interactions, which is a serious safety concern. Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) intends to reverse-engineer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Jorge García-Carrasco , Alejandro Maté , Juan Trujillo

Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has shown that behaviors in language models can be successfully reverse-engineered through circuit analysis. A common criticism, however, is that each circuit is task-specific, and thus such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Jack Merullo , Carsten Eickhoff , Ellie Pavlick

Transformer-based language models have achieved significant success; however, their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque due to the complexity of non-linear interactions and high-dimensional operations. While previous studies have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Lin Zhang , Lijie Hu , Di Wang

Neural networks are growing more capable on their own, but we do not understand their neural mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms' decision-making processes, or mechanistic interpretability, enables (1) accountability and control in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Mason Kadem , Rong Zheng

As AI systems are used in high-stakes applications, ensuring interpretability is crucial. Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) aims to reverse-engineer neural networks by extracting human-understandable algorithms to explain their behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Maxime Méloux , Silviu Maniu , François Portet , Maxime Peyrard

Understanding AI systems' inner workings is critical for ensuring value alignment and safety. This review explores mechanistic interpretability: reverse engineering the computational mechanisms and representations learned by neural networks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Leonard Bereska , Efstratios Gavves

Through considerable effort and intuition, several recent works have reverse-engineered nontrivial behaviors of transformer models. This paper systematizes the mechanistic interpretability process they followed. First, researchers choose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Arthur Conmy , Augustine N. Mavor-Parker , Aengus Lynch , Stefan Heimersheim , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Mechanistic interpretability has identified small sets of attention heads that implement specific behaviours in transformer language models, but recovering these circuits typically requires a bespoke analytical pipeline for each new task.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Barsat Khadka

Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) into human-understandable computational circuits. However, the complexity of pretrained models often obscures the minimal mechanisms required for specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Rabin Adhikari

In this review, we examine the problem of designing interpretable and explainable machine learning models. Interpretability and explainability lie at the core of many machine learning and statistical applications in medicine, economics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Ričards Marcinkevičs , Julia E. Vogt

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) is an emerging sub-field of interpretability that seeks to understand a neural network model by reverse-engineering its internal computations. Recently, MI has garnered significant attention for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Daking Rai , Yilun Zhou , Shi Feng , Abulhair Saparov , Ziyu Yao

We introduce an autonomous multiagent framework for mechanistic interpretability that automates both explaining and finding internal features in large language models. The system runs two coupled loops: (1) explanation refinement, where an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Arnau Marin-Llobet , Javier Ferrando

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to exhibit social, demographic, and gender biases, often as a consequence of the data on which they are trained. In this work, we adopt a mechanistic interpretability approach to analyze how such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Bhavik Chandna , Zubair Bashir , Procheta Sen

Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aleksandar Makelov , George Lange , Neel Nanda

Mechanistic Interpretability aims to understand neural networks through causal explanations. We argue for the Explanatory View Hypothesis: that Mechanistic Interpretability research is a principled approach to understanding models because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kola Ayonrinde , Louis Jaburi

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand model behaviors in terms of specific, interpretable features, often hypothesized to manifest as low-dimensional subspaces of activations. Specifically, recent studies have explored subspace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Aleksandar Makelov , Georg Lange , Neel Nanda
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