Mechanistic Localization bridges mechanistic interpretability and post-training optimization by isolating critical parameters via interpretative approaches and then guiding parameter-efficient Supervi...
arXiv:2606. 09396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is an efficient approach for downstream task adaptation and often serves as the initialization stage for reinforcement learning (RL), but it can show weaker generalization than RL.
arXiv:2607. 00089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has produced a rich inventory of component-level analyses that characterise what neural-network components encode and how they interact.
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.
arXiv:2602. 20062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems.
The paper introduces SAEScientist-Bench, a benchmark that tests whether AI agents can autonomously conduct mechanistic interpretability research using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs). Agents are tasked with designing contrastive probes and navigating a large feature dictionary in Gemma-2-9B-IT to identify optimal features for a target concept, with performance measured against expert-curated references on activation rank, concept selectivity, and causal steering. Results show that while frontier agents can discover features and outperform controls, they still lag behind expert baselines, especially in causal steering, highlighting both the potential and current limitations of closed-loop autonomous AI research.
arXiv:2609.15533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has become the dominant lens for understanding frontier language models, as their inner workings are complex and inheren...
arXiv:2505. 17630v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Circuit localization methods aim to identify the subset of model components responsible for specific behaviors in large language models, enabling detailed mechanistic analysis.
Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, model, and steering configuration. Finding the regime and boundaries of successful steering typically requires expensive grid searches and post-hoc evaluation of full autoregressive rollouts.
The paper introduces a circuit‑grounded framework that links training‑dynamics‑based data valuation with mechanistic interpretability. It defines data quality along learnability, challenge, and alignment, identifies internal model circuits that control these utilities, and uses them as controllable interfaces for data generation. The authors present SAMS, a stage‑aware scheduling method that steers circuit‑guided data to match the model’s evolving optimization needs, achieving more diverse and effective data than prompt‑based baselines on multiple‑choice QA tasks.
arXiv:2606. 09932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a standard pipeline for Large Language Model (LLM) post-training.
arXiv:2601. 21996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Mechanistic Interpretability has identified interpretable circuits in LLMs, their causal origins in training data remain elusive.