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Equation 7 · Part 4 · Running an Interpretability Investigation That Holds Up

Symbol M_clean to C arrow corrupt

Δ(C)=m(Mclean→C←corrupt)−m(Mclean).\Delta(\mathcal{C}) = m\big(M_{\mathrm{clean} \to \mathcal{C} \leftarrow \mathrm{corrupt}}\big) - m\big(M_{\mathrm{clean}}\big).
Mclean→C←corruptM_{\mathrm{clean} \to \mathcal{C} \leftarrow \mathrm{corrupt}}

What this part means

McM_clean to C arrow corrupt is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

McM_clean to C arrow corrupt is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

The passage around this formula

Once the question is scoped, the experiment that tests it is a causal one by convention in this field, and the convention exists for a good reason: a component correlated with a behaviour has told you nothing about whether the model uses it, while a component that changes the behaviour when intervened on has told you something. The standard instrument is activation patching — running the model on a clean input, running it again on a corrupted one, then substituting the corrupted run’s activations into the clean run at a chosen set of components C\mathcal{C} and measuring the change in some behavioural metric m : Δ(C)=m(Mclean→C←corrupt)−m(Mclean)\Delta(\mathcal{C}) = m\big(M_{\mathrm{clean} \to \mathcal{C} \leftarrow \mathrm{corrupt}}\big) - m\big(M_{\mathrm{clean}}\big). The choice buried inside that formula — what counts as…

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A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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