Cross-Layer Interaction under Weight-Space Ablation: A Closed-Form Attention Jacobian Bound and a Test on a Real Pretrained Model
A companion paper studies when activation patching and weight-space ablation agree, inside an idealized model where a conditional computation is carried additively through a residual stream. For the one composition in that model where two carriers are architecturally dependent, an attention head and its own layer's normalization-MLP composition, it derives an exact first-order interaction formula, zero when only the MLP is ablated and second-order bounded when the head is also ablated. That result is confined to a single residual block and checked only on small transformers on a synthetic task. This paper extends the result past both limits. First, the interaction from ablating carriers s...
| Authors | Abdallah Khemais |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 August 2026 |
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