Necessary, Decodable and Reversible, Yet Not Transferable: A Stress Test for Attention-Head Role Claims
Mechanistic studies often assign a component a role when removing it damages a behavior, its activation linearly encodes task information, and restoring that activation repairs the damage. We test the stronger implication: can the same activation carry the requested computation into another prompt? In the roughly 8 of 15 model-family cells receiving our full matched-control transfer assay, covering three 7-8B instruction-tuned models and 5 single-step computation families, tested attention-head states did not produce clean computation transfer. Same-answer and matched-context controls instead exposed inert or broad effects. Positive controls bound this result rather than eliminating its c...
| Authors | Philip Quirke |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 6 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
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