Certified Interventional Fidelity: Anytime-Valid, Adaptive Evaluation of Causal Claims in Mechanistic Interpretability
Mechanistic interpretability often evaluates explanations by intervening on a model: swapping hidden states, patching activations, ablating components, or comparing a compressed model to the original one. These experiments are usually summarized by a point estimate, even though the evaluation may be monitored while it runs or adapted toward suspected failures. This makes it hard to tell whether a reported fidelity or patching effect is a stable causal claim or a consequence of finite sampling and evaluation choices. We introduce Certified Interventional Fidelity (CIF), a statistical layer for interventional interpretability evaluations. CIF first writes the quantity being reported as a ca...
| Authors | Amir Asiaee |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 July 2026 |
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