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We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of an arbitrary blackbox model $f$: given query access to $f$ and an instance $x$, output a small set of $x$'s features that in conjunction essentially determines $f(x)$. We design an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Guy Blanc , Jane Lange , Li-Yang Tan

Explaining why a language model produces a particular output requires local, input-level explanations. Existing methods uncover global capability circuits (e.g., indirect object identification), but not why the model answers a specific…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Tung-Yu Wu , Fazl Barez

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

Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Isaac Lage , Emily Chen , Jeffrey He , Menaka Narayanan , Been Kim , Sam Gershman , Finale Doshi-Velez

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

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) aims to understand neural networks through causal explanations. Though MI has many explanation-generating methods, progress has been limited by the lack of a universal approach to evaluating explanations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kola Ayonrinde , Louis Jaburi

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the inner workings of large neural networks by identifying circuits, or minimal subgraphs within the model that implement algorithms responsible for performing specific tasks. These circuits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Jatin Nainani , Sankaran Vaidyanathan , AJ Yeung , Kartik Gupta , David Jensen

Reasoning about safety, security, and other dependability attributes of autonomous systems is a challenge that needs to be addressed before the adoption of such systems in day-to-day life. Formal methods is a class of methods that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Ashfaq Farooqui , Behrooz Sangchoolie

The literature on provable robustness in machine learning has primarily focused on static prediction problems, such as image classification, in which input samples are assumed to be independent and model performance is measured as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-30 Aounon Kumar , Vinu Sankar Sadasivan , Soheil Feizi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Charles O'Neill , Thang Bui

Compositional generalization-the systematic combination of known components into novel structures-remains a core challenge in cognitive science and machine learning. Although transformer-based large language models can exhibit strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Cheng Tang , Brenden Lake , Mehrdad Jazayeri

Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse engineer neural networks by uncovering which high-level algorithms they implement. Causal abstraction provides a precise notion of when a network implements an algorithm, i.e., a causal model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Theodora-Mara Pîslar , Sara Magliacane , Atticus Geiger

Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) are a central component of many quantum machine learning algorithms, offering a hybrid quantum-classical framework that, under certain aspects, can be considered similar to classical deep neural networks.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-16 Nicola Assolini , Luca Marzari , Isabella Mastroeni , Alessandra di Pierro

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) seeks to uncover how language models (LMs) implement specific behaviors, yet measuring progress in MI remains challenging. The recently released Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (MIB; Mueller et al.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Dana Arad , Yonatan Belinkov , Hanjie Chen , Najoung Kim , Hosein Mohebbi , Aaron Mueller , Gabriele Sarti , Martin Tutek

We present knowledge continuity, a novel definition inspired by Lipschitz continuity which aims to certify the robustness of neural networks across input domains (such as continuous and discrete domains in vision and language,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Alan Sun , Chiyu Ma , Kenneth Ge , Soroush Vosoughi

Cognitive studies and artificial intelligence have developed distinct models for various inferential mechanisms (categorization, induction, abduction, causal inference, contrast, merge, ...). Yet, both natural and artificial views on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Giovanni Sileno , Jean-Louis Dessalles

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…

Recently, face recognition systems have demonstrated remarkable performances and thus gained a vital role in our daily life. They already surpass human face verification accountability in many scenarios. However, they lack explanations for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Martin Knoche , Torben Teepe , Stefan Hörmann , Gerhard Rigoll

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

Learning-based methods could provide solutions to many of the long-standing challenges in control. However, the neural networks (NNs) commonly used in modern learning approaches present substantial challenges for analyzing the resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Michael Everett