Slaying the Hydra: Interaction-Aware Circuit Discovery in Language Models
Localizing behavior to individual components of a language model is a central goal of mechanistic interpretability. However, scoring components one at a time misses context-dependent effects: a primary component can inhibit the activation of a backup, leading to issues with ranking components. Actual causality studies the structure of such interactions via witnesses: variables that provide contextual information to resolve interaction terms. However, estimation with witnesses typically requires combinatorial enumeration and is infeasible in practice. We introduce the witness-integrated set effect (WISE), a family of causal estimands that build on the witness mechanism while taking expecta...
| Authors | Sankaran Vaidyanathan, Rafal Urbaniak, Emily Bunnapradist et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 2 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 October 2026 |
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