arXiv AI

Closure-Validated Circuit Discovery in Attention Heads: Co-activation Proposes, Ablation Disposes

arXiv:2606. 09607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpretability increasingly treats groups of components, not individual units, as the basic object, and proposes to find them by clustering co-activation statistics.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Pattern Selectivity is Not Task-Causal Structure: A Cross-Architecture Mechanistic Study of Composed-Task Circuits in 1B-Class Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.

By Yongzhong Xu
arXiv AI
Jun 2

When Do Attention Circuits Form? Developmental Trajectories of Capability and Attention-Sink Emergence Across Three 1B-ClassArchitectures

arXiv:2606. 02378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We track the developmental trajectory of attention-head circuit formation across three 1B-class language models spanning two architecture families (dense transformer, mixture-of-experts) and two pretraining corpora (The Pile, DCLM): Pythia 1B, OLMo 1B-0724-hf, and OLMoE 1B-7B-0924.

By Yongzhong Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Correcting Gradient-Based Circuit Localization via Interaction-Aware Backpropagation

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.

By Joakim Edin, Casper L. Christensen, R\'obert Csord\'as, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Zhengxuan Wu, Maria Maistro, Jing Huang, Lars Maal{\o}e