S^3martCirc is a self‑supervised framework that jointly discovers and interprets neural circuits in large language models, rather than treating circuit discovery and functional interpretation as separate stages. It abstracts node behavior into two general computational roles that generalize across tasks and introduces a quantitative metric for assigning these roles, enabling simultaneous identification of importance and function. Experiments demonstrate that S^3martCirc outperforms existing methods in circuit discovery.
By Wendy Zheng, Yinhan He, Liang Wu, Jundong Li
arXiv:2608. 05732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge for AI alignment.
By Mehrshad Saadatinia, Parsa Razmara, Ardalan Aryashad, Ali Abbasi, Seyedarmin Azizi
arXiv:2606. 16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior.
By Naiyu Yin, Dennis Wei, Tian Gao, Amit Dhurandhar, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Yue Yu
arXiv:2608.24482v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Mechanistic Localization bridges mechanistic interpretability and post-training optimization by isolating critical parameters via interpretative appr...
By Hang Chen, Jiaying Zhu, Wenya Wang
arXiv:2609.36813v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general capabilities that mechanistic interpretability has attributed to sparse computational circuits. How...
By Chuanpu Liu, Miao Yu, Yikai Cai, Yuanhe Zhang, Zhenhong Zhou, Li Sun, Zuming Jiang, Yufei Guo
Fine‑tuning reshapes internal representations of large language models, affecting attention patterns and layer‑wise activations. The study shows that components identified by EAP as important for task performance cluster in specific layers, yet these layers do not align with those undergoing the largest representational changes. Additionally, overlapping EAP components across different tasks do not guarantee cross‑task transfer and can even degrade performance when tasks differ in nature.
By Lingfang Li, Procheta Sen, Shubham Das, Danushka Bollegala
The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.
By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv:2606. 24026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made substantial progress in automatically localizing circuits, but explaining what localized components do remains labor-intensive and difficult to standardize.
By Ayan Antik Khan, Harsh Kohli, Yuekun Yao, Huan Sun, Ziyu Yao
arXiv:2505. 15548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive transformer language models frequently exhibit training instability when trained on long sequences, particularly under low-precision arithmetic.
By Suvadeep Hajra
arXiv:2601. 22594v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986).
By Aryaman Arora, Zhengxuan Wu, Jacob Steinhardt, Sarah Schwettmann
Mechanistic Localization bridges mechanistic interpretability and post-training optimization by isolating critical parameters via interpretative approaches and then guiding parameter-efficient Supervi...
arXiv:2601. 18699v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities.
By Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundstrom-Imanov