Weights Read and Write Features: Scalable Parameter Decomposition Grounded in Activation Space

Abstract:Activation space and parameter space provide complementary views of model computation. Activations represent information, while weights read, transform, and write that information. Yet existing interpretability methods largely study the two spaces separately, leaving the connection between represented information and parameter-level computation underexplored. We introduce Activation-Supported Parameter Decomposition (ASPD), which jointly decomposes activation and parameter spaces and grounds each learned weight component in the activation features it reads or writes. This grounding constrains otherwise non-unique parameter decompositions using the model's internal activations, while an internal reconstruction objective provides a local learning signal at the weight matrix being analyzed. Together, these properties enable scalable, interpretable, and causally editable parameter decomposition in pretrained large language models, demonstrated on Qwen-3-8B. The learned read--write components can also be composed into parameter-level mechanism circuits. We use ASPD to recover mechanisms underlying the classic IOI circuit and trace semantic transformations through model weights.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.37731 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.37731v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.37731 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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