Equation 17 · Part 7 · Probing, Sparse Autoencoders, Patching, and Steering: The Main Interpretability Methods, Compared
subtraction
subtraction
What this part means
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Its job in the formula
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Full expression→subtraction→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The general operation, activation patching, is usually reported as a normalised score rather than a raw difference, isolating exactly how much of the gap between clean and corrupted behaviour a given component set closes: . where and are a chosen behavioural metric measured on the clean and corrupted runs, and is that same metric after the activations of component set are copied from one run into the other. A score near one means patching alone restores nearly all of the clean behaviour; a score near zero means it restores almost none.
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
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Sources cited in the article section
- [9] Causal Mediation Analysis for Interpreting Neural NLP: The Case of Gender Bias ↗
- [10] Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT ↗
- [11] How to Use and Interpret Activation Patching ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.