{"paper":{"title":"A Distributional View for Visual Mechanistic Interpretability: KL-Minimal Soft-Constraint Principle","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Deyu Meng, Guancheng Zhou, Wentao Shu, Xipeng Qiu, Xuyang Ge, Yisi Luo, Zhengfu He, Zhenyu Jin","submitted_at":"2026-05-17T15:31:42Z","abstract_excerpt":"Most current paradigms in visual mechanistic interpretability (MI) remain confined to interpreting internal units of the vision model via heuristic methods (e.g., top-$K$ activation retrieval or optimization with regularization). In this work, we establish a theoretical distributional view for visual MI, which models the influence of a feature activation on the natural image distribution, thereby formulating a Kullback-Leibler (KL)-minimal optimization problem to model the MI task. Under this framework, statistical biases are identified within previous MI paradigms, which reveal that they may "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.17504","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.17504/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[{"name":"claim_evidence","ran_at":"2026-05-19T21:41:57.663323Z","status":"completed","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0},{"name":"ai_meta_artifact","ran_at":"2026-05-19T21:33:23.634578Z","status":"skipped","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0}],"snapshot_sha256":"06adb7ec85030a70f321c1397975a6f3c8f3cf3f05d426fe9b69182a03bf3e41"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}