FirsthandTech
arXiv: cs.AI preprintsInternational6 November 2026

When Attribution Patching Lies: Diagnosis and a Second-Order Correction

This is an official announcement record

Firsthand records what arXiv: cs.AI preprints announced and links to the original. The wording below is theirs, not ours.

arXiv:2606.09899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to identify which internal components causally drive a language model's behavior. Because these importance estimates serve as the evidence for identifying circuits, systematic errors can lead to the misidentification of the underlying mechanisms. While activation patching provides a gold-standard causal metric, its computational cost is prohibitive at scale. Practitioners instead rely on attribution patching, a gradient-based, first-order approximation whose reliability remains poorly un
Source: arXiv: cs.AI preprints

More from arXiv: cs.AI preprints

This content is for informational purposes only and is not professional advice. Specifications, prices, plan tiers, and features change frequently and may differ from what is shown here; verify current details on the manufacturer's or company's official page before purchasing. Ratings are based on analysis of published documentation, not independent lab testing.