CIRCUS: Circuit Consensus under Uncertainty via Stability Ensembles
Every mechanistic circuit carries an invisible asterisk: it reflects not just the model's computation, but the analyst's choice of pruning threshold. Change that choice and the circuit changes, yet current practice treats a single pruned subgraph as ground truth with no way to distinguish robust structure from threshold artifacts. We introduce CIRCUS, which reframes circuit discovery as a problem of uncertainty over explanations. CIRCUS prunes one attribution graph under B configurations, assigns each edge an empirical inclusion frequency s(e) in [0,1] measuring how robustly it survives across the configuration family, and extracts a consensus circuit of edges present in every view. This ...
| Authors | Swapnil Parekh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 February 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 March 2026 |
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