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arXiv Computation and Language By Michael Li, Nishant Subramani

How Much Do Circuits Tell Us? Measuring the Consistency and Specificity of Language Model Circuits

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The study investigates the consistency and specificity of language model circuits across six tasks and five models, focusing on component-level (attention heads and MLP blocks) and neuron-level circuits. Component-level circuits are highly consistent and causally important but lack task specificity, as ablating a circuit for one task similarly harms performance on other tasks. Neuron-level circuits show higher task specificity but lower consistency, with overlap mainly between closely related tasks. The analysis of Llama‑3.2‑3B reveals that shared components are predominantly MLP blocks, while attention heads act as generic attention‑sink heads.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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