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We report a small, reproducible audit of which sparse-autoencoder (SAE) features of GPT-2 small fire differently on failed versus successful trials of the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. On 300 prompts, GPT-2 small reaches 79.7%…
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…
Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of machine learning models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated…
Mechanistic interpretability has identified small sets of attention heads that implement specific behaviours in transformer language models, but recovering these circuits typically requires a bespoke analytical pipeline for each new task.…
Nonlinear causal discovery from observational data imposes strict identifiability assumptions on the formulation of structural equations utilized in the data generating process. The evaluation of structure learning methods under assumption…
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…
Feature selection is an important but challenging task in causal inference for obtaining unbiased estimates of causal quantities. Properly selected features in causal inference not only significantly reduce the time required to implement a…
Language models often exhibit behaviors that improve performance on a pre-training objective but harm performance on downstream tasks. We propose a novel approach to removing undesirable behaviors by ablating a small number of causal…
Language models (LMs) exhibit and amplify many types of undesirable biases learned from the training data, including gender bias. However, we lack tools for effectively and efficiently changing this behavior without hurting general language…
Recovering the structure of causal graphical models from observational data is an essential yet challenging task for causal discovery in scientific scenarios. Domain-specific causal discovery usually relies on expert validation or prior…
Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has shown that behaviors in language models can be successfully reverse-engineered through circuit analysis. A common criticism, however, is that each circuit is task-specific, and thus such…
Reliable evaluation of modern zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models remains challenging. Subjective tests are costly and hard to reproduce, while objective metrics often saturate, failing to distinguish SOTA systems. To address this, we…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) into human-understandable computational circuits. However, the complexity of pretrained models often obscures the minimal mechanisms required for specific…
We introduce CausaLab, a scalable environment for evaluating interactive causal discovery by LLM agents. Unlike prior evaluations, CausaLab evaluates both whether an agent can solve a problem using causal evidence and whether its answer is…
Prompt optimization automatically refines prompting expressions, unlocking the full potential of LLMs in downstream tasks. However, current prompt optimization methods are costly to train and lack sufficient interpretability. This paper…
The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved substantially through increased test-time computation, typically in the form of intermediate tokens known as chain-of-thought (CoT). However, CoT often becomes…
Many papers have shown that attention heads work in conjunction with each other to perform complex tasks. It's frequently assumed that communication between attention heads is via the addition of specific features to token residuals. In…
Faithful evaluation of language model capabilities is crucial for deriving actionable insights that can inform model development. However, rigorous causal evaluations in this domain face significant methodological challenges, including…
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, yet their internal representations remain opaque. We present the first application of sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to a TSFM, training TopK SAEs on…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…