aiqbench analysis
CircuitLasso addresses the computational bottleneck in mechanistic interpretability by using sparse linear regression to recover circuits from SAE features at a fraction of the cost of intervention-based methods. This approach successfully maps how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through large language models, offering a scalable path to understanding model internals without prohibitive resource demands.
Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models
arXiv:2606.16939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.
Abstract:A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2606.16939 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2606.16939v2 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.16939 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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