Equation 19 · Part 1 · How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done
Symbol m
What this part means
m is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Its job in the formula
m is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol m→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The standard instrument is activation patching. Run the model once on a clean input and once on a deliberately corrupted variant of it — a single token changed, a name swapped — caching every intermediate activation from both runs. Then run the model a third time on the corrupted input, but with one chosen component’s activation overwritten by the value it took during the clean run, and measure the resulting change in some scalar behavioural metric m , typically the gap between the correct answer’s logit and a specific incorrect competitor’s logit:
Learn the underlying idea
A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.
Open the illustrated variables: a letter stands for a value guide →
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Sources cited in the article section
- [11] Towards Best Practices of Activation Patching in Language Models: Metrics and Methods ↗
- [12] Localizing Model Behavior with Path Patching ↗
- [14] Towards Automated Circuit Discovery for Mechanistic Interpretability ↗
- [13] Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.