Equation 12 · Running an Interpretability Investigation That Holds Up
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Symbol Δ
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Symbol C
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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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