English
Related papers

Related papers: Mechanistic Interpretability as Statistical Estima…

200 papers

One of the main challenges in mechanistic interpretability is circuit discovery, determining which parts of a model perform a given task. We build on the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (MIB) and propose three key improvements to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Yaniv Nikankin , Dana Arad , Itay Itzhak , Anja Reusch , Adi Simhi , Gal Kesten-Pomeranz , Yonatan Belinkov

While Mechanistic Interpretability has identified interpretable circuits in LLMs, their causal origins in training data remain elusive. We introduce Mechanistic Data Attribution (MDA), a scalable framework that employs Influence Functions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Jianhui Chen , Yuzhang Luo , Liangming Pan

Transformer-based models have become state-of-the-art tools in various machine learning tasks, including time series classification, yet their complexity makes understanding their internal decision-making challenging. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Matīss Kalnāre , Sofoklis Kitharidis , Thomas Bäck , Niki van Stein

Mechanistic interpretability work attempts to reverse engineer the learned algorithms present inside neural networks. One focus of this work has been to discover 'circuits' -- subgraphs of the full model that explain behaviour on specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Joseph Miller , Bilal Chughtai , William Saunders

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) promises a path toward fully understanding how neural networks make their predictions. Prior work demonstrates that even when trained to perform simple arithmetic, models can implement a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Ouail Kitouni , Niklas Nolte , Víctor Samuel Pérez-Díaz , Sokratis Trifinopoulos , Mike Williams

Interpreting the inner function of neural networks is crucial for the trustworthy development and deployment of these black-box models. Prior interpretability methods focus on correlation-based measures to attribute model decisions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Ola Ahmad , Nicolas Bereux , Loïc Baret , Vahid Hashemi , Freddy Lecue

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

The black box nature of deep neural networks poses a significant challenge for the deployment of transparent and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) systems. With the growing presence of AI in society, it becomes increasingly important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Bianka Kowalska , Halina Kwaśnicka

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to explain how neural networks work by uncovering their underlying mechanisms. As the field grows in influence, it is increasingly important to examine not just models themselves, but the assumptions,…

Artificial neural networks have long been understood as "black boxes": though we know their computation graphs and learned parameters, the knowledge encoded by these weights and functions they perform are not inherently interpretable. As…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Adam Davies , Ashkan Khakzar

This paper investigates a unexplored yet impactful vulnerability in AI explainability used in intrusion detection (IDS): multicollinearity-induced instability. Despite extensive reliance on post-hoc explainability tools such as SHAP or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Ioannis J. Vourganas , Anna Lito Michala

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

Selective rationalization improves neural network interpretability by identifying a small subset of input features -- the rationale -- that best explains or supports the prediction. A typical rationalization criterion, i.e. maximum mutual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Shiyu Chang , Yang Zhang , Mo Yu , Tommi S. Jaakkola

As machine learning systems are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, there is a growing emphasis placed on making them interpretable to improve trust in these systems. In response, a range of interpretable machine learning (IML)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-22 Luqin Gan , Tarek M. Zikry , Genevera I. Allen

Interpretability provides a toolset for understanding how and why neural networks behave in certain ways. However, there is little unity in the field: most studies employ ad-hoc evaluations and do not share theoretical foundations, making…

Causal mediation analysis (CMA) is a powerful method to dissect the total effect of a treatment into direct and mediated effects within the potential outcome framework. This is important in many scientific applications to identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Ziyang Jiang , Yiling Liu , Michael H. Klein , Ahmed Aloui , Yiman Ren , Keyu Li , Vahid Tarokh , David Carlson

Mutual information (MI) is a fundamental measure of statistical dependence between two variables, yet accurate estimation from finite data remains notoriously difficult. No estimator is universally reliable, and common approaches fail in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2025-10-02 Eslam Abdelaleem , K. Michael Martini , Ilya Nemenman

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

Neural models have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse ranking tasks. However, the processes and internal mechanisms along which they determine relevance are still largely unknown. Existing approaches for analyzing neural…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Catherine Chen , Jack Merullo , Carsten Eickhoff

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