arXiv AI By Luyang Zhang, Jialu Wang

When Attribution Patching Lies: Diagnosis and a Second-Order Correction

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arXiv:2606. 09899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to identify which internal components causally drive a language model's behavior.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Sensitivity, Causality, and Repair Dissociate: A Layer-Wise Analysis of Perturbation Robustness and Its Scaling

arXiv:2608. 03842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model fails on surface-perturbed input (typos, OCR noise, homophones), "which layer is responsible" has three natural operationalizations: where representations diverge most (sensitivity), where restoring clean activations recovers the prediction (causality), and where a small adapter can repair the damage (compensatory capacity) - and we show these three layer maps dissociate.

By Nathan Labiosa, David Buff, Ena Nayak, Erica Donno
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Memory Savings at What Cost? A Study of Alternatives to Backpropagation

arXiv:2506. 21833v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forward-mode automatic differentiation (FmAD) and zero-order (ZO) optimization are increasingly proposed as memory-efficient, backpropagation-free alternatives for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, yet their benefits are typically evaluated only against standard backpropagation (BP), omitting memory-efficient variants such as activation checkpointing.

By Kunjal Panchal, Sunav Choudhary, Yuriy Brun, Hui Guan