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Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of machine learning models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Kevin Wang , Alexandre Variengien , Arthur Conmy , Buck Shlegeris , Jacob Steinhardt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced a rapid rise in AI, changing a wide range of applications with their advanced capabilities. As these models become increasingly integral to decision-making, the need for thorough…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Jatin Nainani

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand how neural networks generalize beyond their training data by reverse-engineering their internal structures. We introduce patterning as the dual problem: given a desired form of generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 George Wang , Daniel Murfet

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque. Mechanistic interpretability (i.e., the systematic study of how neural networks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Usman Naseem

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

Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer transformer computations by identifying causal circuits through activation patching. However, scaling these interventions across diverse prompts and task families produces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Ruben Fernandez-Boullon , David N. Olivieri

Circuit analysis of any certain model behavior is a central task in mechanistic interpretability. We introduce our circuit discovery pipeline with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and a variant called Transcoders. With these two modules inserted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Xuyang Ge , Fukang Zhu , Wentao Shu , Junxuan Wang , Zhengfu He , Xipeng Qiu

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

While transformer models exhibit strong capabilities on linguistic tasks, their complex architectures make them difficult to interpret. Recent work has aimed to reverse engineer transformer models into human-readable representations called…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Michael Lan , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez

Understanding the internal circuits that language models use to solve tasks remains a central challenge in mechanistic interpretability. A crucial part of finding circuits is understanding why each attention head attends where it does. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Gabriel Franco , Lucas M. Tassis , Azalea Rohr , Mark Crovella

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaron Mueller , Albert Webson , Jackson Petty , Tal Linzen

The fields of explainable AI and mechanistic interpretability aim to uncover the internal structure of neural networks, with circuit discovery as a central tool for understanding model computations. Existing approaches, however, rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Elena Golimblevskaia , Aakriti Jain , Bruno Puri , Ammar Ibrahim , Wojciech Samek , Sebastian Lapuschkin

Recent advances in language model interpretability have identified circuits, critical subnetworks that replicate model behaviors, yet how knowledge is structured within these crucial subnetworks remains opaque. To gain an understanding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Huaizhi Ge , Frank Rudzicz , Zining Zhu
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