Equation 17 · 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
S is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
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Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
Concrete rules follow from the sections above and are worth stating as rules rather than aspirations. Name the corruption method and the metric explicitly — “we ablated the circuit” is not a method, “we mean-ablated components and measured the change in logit difference on the IOI task” is. Report the specificity margin S alongside the raw effect, not the raw effect alone. State the checkpoint identifier and the date it was evaluated, because the same architecture at a different training step is a different object. Say explicitly whether the claim has been tested outside the distribution it was found on, and if it has not, say that it has not rather than letting the reader assume…
Read the full surrounding passage
Concrete rules follow from the sections above and are worth stating as rules rather than aspirations. Name the corruption method and the metric explicitly — “we ablated the circuit” is not a method, “we mean-ablated components and measured the change in logit difference on the IOI task” is. Report the specificity margin S alongside the raw effect, not the raw effect alone. State the checkpoint identifier and the date it was evaluated, because the same architecture at a different training step is a different object. Say explicitly whether the claim has been tested outside the distribution it was found on, and if it has not, say that it has not rather than letting the reader assume otherwise.
Sources cited in the article section
- [11] Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability ↗
- [13] Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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