Equation 5 · How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
This mathematical expression combines the displayed quantities; its precise role follows from the surrounding article text. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
Symbol θ
θ is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
How to interpret it
Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
with fit by ordinary gradient descent to minimise cross-entropy against labelled examples. Alain and Bengio introduced this move under the name “probes” and made an observation that still organises how the technique is used: linear separability of a target property increases monotonically with depth in the networks they studied, which is itself informative about where in the computation a property becomes available for linear readout [ 1 ] .
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
Return to How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done