Equation 4 · Part 5 · How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done
Symbol w^top
What this part means
op is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Its job in the formula
op is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Full expression→Symbol w^top→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The first concrete operation in almost any interpretability project is the least glamorous: run the model forward on a batch of inputs, and at some chosen point in the computation — a residual-stream position, an attention head’s output, a particular MLP layer — copy the activation tensor out before it is overwritten by the next step of the forward pass. This is extraction, and it produces nothing on its own beyond a large table of vectors. What turns it into evidence is probing: fitting a small, separately trained classifier to predict some property of interest directly from those vectors, while the model’s own weights stay frozen. Formally, for an activation read out at layer …
Learn the underlying idea
An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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