Circuit Claims Depend on What Is Extracted and How It Is Compared
Circuit extraction identifies model components whose presence preserves a target behavior under ablation, but preserving behavior does not single out one circuit. We study this in a synthetic Lean tactic-prediction benchmark with fixed proof rules and randomized surface form. Across dense and weight-sparse checkpoints of the same transformer, evaluated on atomic and compositional proofs, we vary which extracted object is reported: a compact prediction-preserving circuit, a broader graph retaining surrounding read, write, and routing structure, or a subgraph extracted with a post-ablation loss budget. First, overlap between groups of component-to-component connections is low, sometimes clo...
| Authors | Yang Sheng, Jie Fu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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