Data-driven Circuit Discovery for Interpretability of Language Models
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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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:2606. 08236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, there is a growing need for tools that audit not only model outputs but also the internal computations that produce them.
arXiv:2606. 16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task.
The paper investigates whether structural differences in circuits discovered by circuit discovery methods reflect distinct mechanisms. By varying input-token frequency while keeping the task constant, the authors find that although circuits appear specialized by frequency structurally, functional and representational analyses reveal no reliable differences, a phenomenon they call phantom specialization. Across multiple models and tasks, structurally distinct circuits implement the same computation, with core shared subgraphs recovering most of the performance and interchangeable internal representations confirmed by causal interventions.
arXiv:2601. 09624v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine unlearning is becoming essential for building trustworthy and compliant language models.
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.