The Communication Map of a Transformer
The components of a transformer communicate by writing to and reading from a shared residual stream, and the mechanistic interpretability literature has mapped these connections by hand, one circuit at a time. We present the communication map, which charts every potential communication channel from the geometry of the model's weights alone, generalizing the composition score of Elhage et al. (2021) into a single coupling coefficient covering all 18 connection classes, from head-to-head to neuron-to-neuron and everything in between. We provide an account of the properties of the coupling coefficient, including its geometric interpretation and its exact chance level. The census finds that 7...
| Authors | Richard Zhe Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 22 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 September 2026 |
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