ICLR 2026 paper brings provable guarantees to automated circuit discovery in mechanistic interpretability
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-21
A paper accepted to ICLR 2026 by Itamar Hadad, Guy Katz, and Shahaf Bassan leverages recent advances in neural network verification to build automated circuit discovery algorithms with provable guarantees.
The work focuses on three types of guarantees:
- Input domain robustness: the circuit agrees with the model across continuous input regions
- Robust patching: certifying circuit alignment under continuous patching perturbations
- Minimality: formalizing a wide array of notions of succinctness
The authors also uncover novel theoretical connections among these three guarantee families, with critical implications for algorithm convergence. Experiments with state-of-the-art verifiers on various vision models show substantially stronger robustness guarantees than standard circuit discovery methods, establishing a principled foundation for provable circuit discovery.
Related event: ICLR 2026 Paper: Automated Circuit Discovery with Provable Guarantees(2 posts)→
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