Equation 10 · Part 4 · Running an Interpretability Investigation That Holds Up
=
=
What this part means
The expressions on both sides represent the same quantity under the stated assumptions.
Its job in the formula
The equals sign connects the complete expression on the left with the complete expression on the right. Both sides must have compatible units.
Full expression→=→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The defence against this is a control condition run alongside the target one, not after it: intervene identically on a component set ' matched to the target set in size, depth and baseline activation statistics, but which the hypothesis explicitly predicts should have no effect, and compare . A specificity margin S that is small relative to the run-to-run variance means the intervention is detecting generic sensitivity to perturbation somewhere in the network, not the mechanism under test — which is exactly the failure mode the subspace illusion exhibits. Reporting alone, without the matched control alongside it, is reporting half…
Learn the underlying idea
An equals sign says that the expression on its left and the expression on its right have the same value under the stated definitions and assumptions.
Open the illustrated equality: what the equals sign claims guide →
Sources cited in the article section
- [3] Towards Best Practices of Activation Patching in Language Models: Metrics and Methods ↗
- [4] Causal Scrubbing: A Method for Rigorously Testing Interpretability Hypotheses ↗
- [5] Is This the Subspace You Are Looking for? An Interpretability Illusion for Subspace Activation Patching ↗
- [6] Towards Automated Circuit Discovery for Mechanistic Interpretability ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.