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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

Most efforts in interpretability in deep learning have focused on (1) extracting explanations of a specific downstream task in relation to the input features and (2) imposing constraints on the model, often at the expense of predictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Marco Bertolini , Djork-Arné Clevert , Floriane Montanari

Circuit discovery is a key step in many mechanistic interpretability pipelines. Current methods, such as Path Patching, are computationally expensive and have limited in-depth circuit analysis for smaller models. In this study, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Frauke Andersen , William Rudman , Ruochen Zhang , Carsten Eickhoff

Many proposed applications of neural networks in machine learning, cognitive/brain science, and society hinge on the feasibility of inner interpretability via circuit discovery. This calls for empirical and theoretical explorations of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Federico Adolfi , Martina G. Vilas , Todd Wareham

Following their success across many domains, transformers have also proven effective for symbolic regression (SR); however, the internal mechanisms underlying their generation of mathematical operators remain largely unexplored. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Arco van Breda , Erman Acar

Attribution methods reveal which input features a neural network uses for a prediction, adding transparency to their decisions. A common problem is that these attributions seem unspecific, highlighting both important and irrelevant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Nils Philipp Walter , Jilles Vreeken , Jonas Fischer

The study of the attribution of input features to the output of neural network models is an active area of research. While numerous Explainable AI (XAI) techniques have been proposed to interpret these models, the systematic and automated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Aria Nourbakhsh , Salima Lamsiyah , Adelaide Danilov , Christoph Schommer

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to reverse-engineer neural network computations into human-understandable algorithms, yet extracting sparse computational circuits from billion-parameter language models remains challenging due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Mohammed Mudassir Uddin , Shahnawaz Alam , Mohammed Kaif Pasha

Deep neural networks have demonstrated superior performance in artificial intelligence applications, but the opaqueness of their inner working mechanism is one major drawback in their application. The prevailing unit-based interpretation is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Lei Lyu , Chen Pang , Jihua Wang

We introduce methods for discovering and applying sparse feature circuits. These are causally implicated subnetworks of human-interpretable features for explaining language model behaviors. Circuits identified in prior work consist of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Samuel Marks , Can Rager , Eric J. Michaud , Yonatan Belinkov , David Bau , Aaron Mueller

Understanding the internal mechanisms of transformer-based language models remains challenging. Mechanistic interpretability based on circuit discovery aims to reverse engineer neural networks by analyzing their internal processes at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Lin Zhang , Wenshuo Dong , Zhuoran Zhang , Shu Yang , Lijie Hu , Ninghao Liu , Pan Zhou , Di Wang

In recent years, machine learning and deep learning approaches such as artificial neural networks have gained in popularity for the resolution of automatic puzzle resolution problems. Indeed, these methods are able to extract high-level…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-11-16 Cecilia Ostertag , Marie Beurton-Aimar

Neural networks are often utilised in critical domain applications (e.g. self-driving cars, financial markets, and aerospace engineering), even though they exhibit overconfident predictions for ambiguous inputs. This deficiency demonstrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-03 John Mitros , Brian Mac Namee

Understanding how neural networks arrive at their predictions is essential for debugging, auditing, and deployment. Mechanistic interpretability pursues this goal by identifying circuits - minimal subnetworks responsible for specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Alaa Anani , Tobias Lorenz , Bernt Schiele , Mario Fritz , Jonas Fischer

Attribution methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) aim to identify image regions that influence model predictions, but producing faithful and well-localized attributions remains challenging. Existing attribution methods face several…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Amirmohammad Izadi , Mohammadali Banayeeanzade , Alireza Mirrokni , Hosein Hasani , Mobin Bagherian , Faridoun Mehri , Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah

This paper introduces an efficient and robust method for discovering interpretable circuits in large language models using discrete sparse autoencoders. Our approach addresses key limitations of existing techniques, namely computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Charles O'Neill , Thang Bui

Automated program repair (APR) attempts to generate correct patches and has drawn wide attention from both academia and industry in the past decades. However, APR is continuously struggling with the patch overfitting issue due to the weak…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Quanjun Zhang , Haichuan Hu , Chunrong Fang , Ye Shang , Tao Zheng , Zhenyu Chen , Yun Yang , Liang Xiao

Pruning well-trained neural networks is effective to achieve a promising accuracy-efficiency trade-off in computer vision regimes. However, most of existing pruning algorithms only focus on the classification task defined on the source…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Ruichen Li , Binghui Li , Qi Qian , Liwei Wang

Localizing behaviors of neural networks to a subset of the network's components or a subset of interactions between components is a natural first step towards analyzing network mechanisms and possible failure modes. Existing work is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill , Chris MacLeod , Lucas Sato , Aryaman Arora

Activation patching is a standard method in mechanistic interpretability for localizing the components of a model responsible for specific behaviors, but it is computationally expensive to apply at scale. Attribution patching offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Farnoush Rezaei Jafari , Oliver Eberle , Ashkan Khakzar , Neel Nanda