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Automatically Identifying Local and Global Circuits with Linear Computation Graphs

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arxiv 2405.13868 v2 pith:6EOFZBL7 submitted 2024-05-22 cs.LG cs.CL

Automatically Identifying Local and Global Circuits with Linear Computation Graphs

classification cs.LG cs.CL
keywords circuitslinearmodelcalledcircuitcomputationgraphlocal
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Circuit analysis of any certain model behavior is a central task in mechanistic interpretability. We introduce our circuit discovery pipeline with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and a variant called Transcoders. With these two modules inserted into the model, the model's computation graph with respect to OV and MLP circuits becomes strictly linear. Our methods do not require linear approximation to compute the causal effect of each node. This fine-grained graph identifies both end-to-end and local circuits accounting for either logits or intermediate features. We can scalably apply this pipeline with a technique called Hierarchical Attribution. We analyze three kinds of circuits in GPT-2 Small: bracket, induction, and Indirect Object Identification circuits. Our results reveal new findings underlying existing discoveries.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Language models represent their current reasoning in a small, readable set of verbalizable vectors (the J-space) that functions like a global workspace.

  2. Toy Combinatorial Interpretability Models Reveal Lottery Tickets in Early Feature Space

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    In a combinatorial toy setting, winning lottery tickets preserve families of compatible feature locations in early feature space that balance proximity to final codes with low interference, rather than specific weight...

  3. Not How Many, But Which: Parameter Placement in Low-Rank Adaptation

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Gradient-informed placement of LoRA parameters recovers full performance under GRPO while random placement does not, due to differences in gradient rank and stability across training regimes.

  4. Hierarchical Sparse Circuit Extraction from Billion-Parameter Language Models through Scalable Attribution Graph Decomposition

    cs.LG 2026-01 reject novelty 4.0

    HAGD claims to extract sparse circuits from billion-parameter LMs by hierarchical graph coarsening and GNN-guided search, but the O(n^2 log n) complexity guarantee rests on an unproven greedy-optimality assumption.