Equation 7 · Part 7 · What a Circuit Explains: The State and Limits of Mechanistic Interpretability
subtraction
subtraction
What this part means
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Its job in the formula
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Full expression→subtraction→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
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.