Align, Unify, Suppress, Route: A Coherentist View of Transformer Computation
Mechanistic interpretability has identified transformer circuits, but lacks a shared vocabulary for describing how their functions compose across tasks and architectures. We introduce Coherentist Probabilistic Compositionalism (CPC), an interpretive framework that grounds transformer computation in coherentist theories of interpretation and describes it through four operator roles. Alignment identifies candidate relations, unification integrates supporting information, suppression reduces incompatible alternatives, and routing carries selected information to the output. Across 15 models from five architecture families, the suppression, unification, and routing weight-space signatures corr...
| Authors | Nura Aljaafari, Andre Freitas |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 August 2026 |
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