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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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yisong Miao , Min-Yen Kan

Symbolic Regression (SR) aims to discover interpretable equations from observational data, with the potential to reveal underlying principles behind natural phenomena. However, existing approaches often fall into the Pseudo-Equation Trap:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing Xiao , Xinhai Chen , Jiaming Peng , Qinglin Wang , Menghan Jia , Zhiquan Lai , Guangping Yu , Dongsheng Li , Tiejun Li , Jie Liu

The vision transformer (ViT) has achieved state-of-the-art results in various vision tasks. It utilizes a learnable position embedding (PE) mechanism to encode the location of each image patch. However, it is presently unclear if this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Zhengyang Yu , Jochen Triesch

Self-supervised learning (SSL) with vision transformers (ViTs) has proven effective for representation learning as demonstrated by the impressive performance on various downstream tasks. Despite these successes, existing ViT-based SSL…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Chaitanya Devaguptapu , Sumukh Aithal , Shrinivas Ramasubramanian , Moyuru Yamada , Manohar Kaul

Graph transformers extend global self-attention to graph-structured data, achieving notable success in graph learning. Recently, random walk structural encoding (RWSE) has been found to further enhance their predictive power by encoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Louis Airale , Antonio Longa , Mattia Rigon , Andrea Passerini , Roberto Passerone

\emph{Circuit analysis} is a promising technique for understanding the internal mechanisms of language models. However, existing analyses are done in small models far from the state of the art. To address this, we present a case study of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Tom Lieberum , Matthew Rahtz , János Kramár , Neel Nanda , Geoffrey Irving , Rohin Shah , Vladimir Mikulik

Underlying mechanisms of memorization in LLMs -- the verbatim reproduction of training data -- remain poorly understood. What exact part of the network decides to retrieve a token that we would consider as start of memorization sequence?…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ilya Lasy , Peter Knees , Stefan Woltran

Symbolic regression is emerging as a promising machine learning method for learning succinct underlying interpretable mathematical expressions directly from data. Whereas it has been traditionally tackled with genetic programming, it has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Nour Makke , Sanjay Chawla

Symbolic regression (SR) models complex systems by discovering mathematical expressions that capture underlying relationships in observed data. However, most SR methods prioritize minimizing prediction error over identifying the governing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Giorgio Morales , John W. Sheppard

Recent work has shown that the computations of Transformers can be simulated in the RASP family of programming languages. These findings have enabled improved understanding of the expressive capacity and generalization abilities of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xinting Huang , Aleksandra Bakalova , Satwik Bhattamishra , William Merrill , Michael Hahn

Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover the underlying mathematical expressions that explain observed data. This holds promise for both gaining scientific insight and for producing inherently interpretable and generalizable models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 David Otte , Jörg K. H. Franke , Arbër Zela , Fábio Ferreira , Frank Hutter

We present causal head gating (CHG), a scalable method for interpreting the functional roles of attention heads in transformer models. CHG learns soft gates over heads and assigns them a causal taxonomy - facilitating, interfering, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Andrew Nam , Henry Conklin , Yukang Yang , Thomas Griffiths , Jonathan Cohen , Sarah-Jane Leslie

We propose using mechanistic interpretability -- techniques for reverse engineering model weights into human-interpretable algorithms -- to derive and compactly prove formal guarantees on model performance. We prototype this approach by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Jason Gross , Rajashree Agrawal , Thomas Kwa , Euan Ong , Chun Hei Yip , Alex Gibson , Soufiane Noubir , Lawrence Chan

Vision Transformers (ViTs) enabled the use of the transformer architecture on vision tasks showing impressive performances when trained on big datasets. However, on relatively small datasets, ViTs are less accurate given their lack of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Guglielmo Camporese , Elena Izzo , Lamberto Ballan

Symbolic regression (SR) has emerged as a powerful method for uncovering interpretable mathematical relationships from data, offering a novel route to both scientific discovery and efficient empirical modelling. This article introduces the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Deaglan J. Bartlett , Harry Desmond , Pedro G. Ferreira , Gabriel Kronberger

Symbolic Regression (SR) is a type of regression analysis to automatically find the mathematical expression that best fits the data. Currently, SR still basically relies on various searching strategies so that a sample-specific model is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jiachen Li , Ye Yuan , Hong-Bin Shen

Symbolic computer vision represents diagrams through explicit logical rules and structured representations, enabling interpretable understanding in machine vision. This requires fundamentally different learning paradigms from pixel-based…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Shan Zhang , Aotian Chen , Kai Zou , Jindong Gu , Yuan Xue , Anton van den Hengel

How can neural networks perform so well on compositional tasks even though they lack explicit compositional representations? We use a novel analysis technique called ROLE to show that recurrent neural networks perform well on such tasks by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Paul Soulos , Tom McCoy , Tal Linzen , Paul Smolensky

Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover closed-form mathematical expressions that accurately describe data, offering interpretability and analytical insight beyond standard black-box models. Existing SR methods often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Mansooreh Montazerin , Majd Al Aawar , Antonio Ortega , Ajitesh Srivastava