arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

How Do Linear Probes Emerge? A Circuit-Tracing Framework with Concept-Targeted Attribution

The paper introduces Concept-Targeted Attribution (CTA), a method that trains attribution graphs to explain the emergence of internal concept representations in language models, rather than just the final token prediction. CTA produces probe-specific circuits that reveal which internal computations drive a linear probe’s accuracy, and cross-layer transcoders demonstrate that these graphs contain predictive structure across multiple concept categories. Causal ablations show that probe-targeted and logit-targeted graphs capture distinct mechanisms, with probe-relevant features affecting internal concept scores and logit-relevant features altering generated tokens.

By Vedant Palit, Florent Draye, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

LLMs Can Annotate Attribution Graphs

arXiv:2608. 02632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit tracing is an exciting technique for revealing the internal computation of language models, but it requires a time-intensive manual step of grouping individual features or MLP neurons into supernodes.

By Ameen Patel, Max Zhang, Nathan Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Can Graph Learning Learn Circuits?

arXiv:2608. 08536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit localization is a mechanistic interpretability task whose goal is to identify a sparse subgraph of a transformer's computation graph sufficient to reproduce a particular behavior.

By Chester Tan, Moritz Lampert, Courtney Maynard, Ankit Ramakrishnan, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Ingo Scholtes