Equation 7 · Part 5 · What a Circuit Explains: The State and Limits of Mechanistic Interpretability
Symbol a_C^corrupt
What this part means
orrupt is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Its job in the formula
orrupt is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Full expression→Symbol a_C^corrupt→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
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 , . Meng and colleagues used a version of this — causal tracing — to localise factual recall, finding that a distinct set of steps in middle-layer feed-forward modules mediate factual predictions at the subject token, and then used the localisation to perform rank-one weight edits that changed specific facts [ 14 ] . The edit is the strongest form of the argument: a…
Learn the underlying idea
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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