Pith Number

pith:6IV7I75E

pith:2026:6IV7I75EBOVETGY7TKL7GUAVOV

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Beyond the Black Box: Interpretability of Agentic AI Tool Use

Ariye Shater, Hariom Tatsat

A toolkit of sparse autoencoders and linear probes can identify the internal features that drive tool-use decisions inside AI agents before they act.

arxiv:2605.06890 v2 · 2026-05-07 · cs.AI · cs.MA

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\pithnumber{6IV7I75EBOVETGY7TKL7GUAVOV}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

By decomposing activations into sparse features, it identifies the internal layers and features most associated with tool decisions and tests their functional importance through feature ablation.

C2weakest assumption

That the sparse features extracted by SAEs and the predictions from linear probes correspond to causally relevant internal representations of tool-use decisions rather than spurious correlations.

C3one line summary

A mechanistic interpretability toolkit with SAEs and probes enables pre-action inference of tool decisions in AI agents trained on function-calling trajectories.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-22T01:03:19.955494Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

f22bf47fa40baa499b1f9a97f350157571fb79107dc989c4b39993cc3cac4990

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.06890 · arxiv_version: 2605.06890v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.06890 · pith_short_12: 6IV7I75EBOVE · pith_short_16: 6IV7I75EBOVETGY7 · pith_short_8: 6IV7I75E

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/6IV7I75EBOVETGY7TKL7GUAVOV \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: f22bf47fa40baa499b1f9a97f350157571fb79107dc989c4b39993cc3cac4990

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "7bc38ef75e145719bbda9943dbdd8387887e39843ae163fd3d16e1e9ed558bb4",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.MA"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-07T19:47:30Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "9395ffb1953fc09f81fb0ddd480e4d129d1955cd4e21c6ca6ccc7d41dd643e8d"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.06890",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}