Equation 6 · What a Circuit Explains: The State and Limits of Mechanistic Interpretability
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The standard instrument is activation patching : run the model on a clean input, run it on a corrupted one, then substitute the activations of a chosen component from one run into the other and measure the change in some behavioural metric. Formally, for a set of components and a metric m ,
Sources cited in the article section
- [14] Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT ↗
- [17] Causal Abstraction: A Theoretical Foundation for Mechanistic Interpretability ↗
- [15] Towards Best Practices of Activation Patching in Language Models: Metrics and Methods ↗
- [16] Is This the Subspace You Are Looking for? An Interpretability Illusion for Subspace Activation Patching ↗
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