Equation 11 · Running an Interpretability Investigation That Holds Up
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.
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Symbol S
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What the article says around this equation
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 an experiment.
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 give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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