Interpretability discussion: why component-level circuits lack specificity but neuron-level fares better
aryaman2020 · x · 2026-09-05
aryaman2020 comments on a circuit interpretability study with two points:
- Low specificity at component level is unsurprising: layer 0 MLP consistently shows extremely high attribution across tasks (the 'effective embedding'), and treating whole MLP blocks as nodes is conceptually odd since they contain so many parameters they inevitably do everything.
- The original finding: neuron-level circuits show better specificity — ablating a task's own circuit hurts it far more than ablating another's — but at the cost of consistency, with very few neurons recurring across examples of the same task.
Related event: Circuit interpretability hits a wall as ablations miss across tasks(4 posts)→
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