English
Related papers

Related papers: Formal Mechanistic Interpretability: Automated Cir…

200 papers

Extensively evaluating the capabilities of (large) language models is difficult. Rapid development of state-of-the-art models induce benchmark saturation, while creating more challenging datasets is labor-intensive. Inspired by the recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Alan Sun

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

Circuit discovery has gradually become one of the prominent methods for mechanistic interpretability, and research on circuit completeness has also garnered increasing attention. Methods of circuit discovery that do not guarantee…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Hang Chen , Jiaying Zhu , Xinyu Yang , Wenya Wang

As autonomy becomes prevalent in many applications, ranging from recommendation systems to fully autonomous vehicles, there is an increased need to provide safety guarantees for such systems. The problem is difficult, as these are large,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-22 Corina S. Pasareanu , Divya Gopinath , Huafeng Yu

Despite significant progress in post-hoc explanation methods for neural networks, many remain heuristic and lack provable guarantees. A key approach for obtaining explanations with provable guarantees is by identifying a cardinally-minimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Shahaf Bassan , Yizhak Yisrael Elboher , Tobias Ladner , Volkan Şahin , Jan Kretinsky , Matthias Althoff , Guy Katz

Interpreting machine learning models is challenging but crucial for ensuring the safety of deep networks in autonomous driving systems. Due to the prevalence of deep learning based perception models in autonomous vehicles, accurately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-27 Alex Gu , Tsui-Wei Weng , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu , Luca Daniel

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Philipp Mondorf , Sondre Wold , Barbara Plank

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Michael A. Lepori , Thomas Serre , Ellie Pavlick

We propose and investigate probabilistic guarantees for the adversarial robustness of classification algorithms. While traditional formal verification approaches for robustness are intractable and sampling-based approaches do not provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Peter Blohm , Patrick Indri , Thomas Gärtner , Sagar Malhotra

Mechanistic interpretability is an emerging diagnostic approach for neural models that has gained traction in broader natural language processing domains. This paradigm aims to provide attribution to components of neural systems where…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Andrew Parry , Catherine Chen , Carsten Eickhoff , Sean MacAvaney

Sparse dictionary learning has been a rapidly growing technique in mechanistic interpretability to attack superposition and extract more human-understandable features from model activations. We ask a further question based on the extracted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Zhengfu He , Xuyang Ge , Qiong Tang , Tianxiang Sun , Qinyuan Cheng , Xipeng Qiu

As deep neural networks (DNNs) get adopted in an ever-increasing number of applications, explainability has emerged as a crucial desideratum for these models. In many real-world tasks, one of the principal reasons for requiring…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Vedant Nanda , Till Speicher , John P. Dickerson , Krishna P. Gummadi , Muhammad Bilal Zafar

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

To date, most discoveries of network subcomponents that implement human-interpretable computations in deep vision models have involved close study of single units and large amounts of human labor. We explore scalable methods for extracting…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Achyuta Rajaram , Neil Chowdhury , Antonio Torralba , Jacob Andreas , Sarah Schwettmann

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Daking Rai , Mor Geva , Ziyu Yao

Mechanistic interpretability papers increasingly use causal vocabulary: circuits, mediators, causal abstraction, monosemanticity. Such claims require explicit identification assumptions. A purposive audit of 10 papers across four…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zezheng Lin , Fengming Liu

Understanding AI systems' inner workings is critical for ensuring value alignment and safety. This review explores mechanistic interpretability: reverse engineering the computational mechanisms and representations learned by neural networks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Leonard Bereska , Efstratios Gavves

Frontier AI systems require governance mechanisms that can verify internal alignment, not just behavioral compliance. Private governance mechanisms audits, certification, insurance, and procurement are emerging to complement public…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Aadit Sengupta , Pratinav Seth , Vinay Kumar Sankarapu

Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xinhang Ma , Junlin Wu , Yiannis Kantaros , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ward Gauderis , Thomas Dooms , Steven T. Holmer , Kola Ayonrinde , Geraint A. Wiggins