Related papers: Query Circuits: Explaining How Language Models Ans…
The circuits framework in mechanistic interpretability aims to identify causally important sparse subgraphs of model components, typically evaluated by measuring necessity and sufficiency. We measure circuit reuse, the proportion of…
Recent studies on reasoning in language models (LMs) have sparked a debate on whether they can learn systematic inferential principles or merely exploit superficial patterns in the training data. To understand and uncover the mechanisms…
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…
Circuit discovery aims to explain how language models (LMs) implement a specific task by localizing and interpreting a circuit, a computational subgraph responsible for the LM's behavior. Existing circuit discovery methods are…
Which components in transformer language models are responsible for discourse understanding? We hypothesize that sparse computational graphs, termed as discursive circuits, control how models process discourse relations. Unlike simpler…
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…
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…
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…
Large language models are increasingly used to process documents and facilitate question-answering on them. In our paper, we extract mechanistic circuits for this real-world language modeling task: context-augmented language modeling for…
A fundamental question in interpretability research is to what extent neural networks, particularly language models, implement reusable functions through subnetworks that can be composed to perform more complex tasks. Recent advances in…
A widely used strategy to discover and understand language model mechanisms is circuit analysis. A circuit is a minimal subgraph of a model's computation graph that executes a specific task. We identify a gap in existing circuit discovery…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly…
A class of explainable NLP models for reasoning tasks support their decisions by generating free-form or structured explanations, but what happens when these supporting structures contain errors? Our goal is to allow users to interactively…
Neural network models have achieved high performance on a wide variety of complex tasks, but the algorithms that they implement are notoriously difficult to interpret. It is often necessary to hypothesize intermediate variables involved in…
This paper introduces the notion of referring forms as a new metric for analyzing sequential circuits from a functional perspective. Sequential circuits are modeled as causal stream functions, the outputs of which depend solely on the past…
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…
The field of query-by-example aims at inferring queries from output examples given by non-expert users, by finding the underlying logic that binds the examples. However, for a very small set of examples, it is difficult to correctly infer…
Language model prompt optimization research has shown that semantically and grammatically well-formed manually crafted prompts are routinely outperformed by automatically generated token sequences with no apparent meaning or syntactic…
Explanations of neural models aim to reveal a model's decision-making process for its predictions. However, recent work shows that current methods giving explanations such as saliency maps or counterfactuals can be misleading, as they are…
*Automated circuit discovery* is a central tool in mechanistic interpretability for identifying the internal components of neural networks responsible for specific behaviors. While prior methods have made significant progress, they…