activity
20212026
most citedOpen Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability

9 citations · 12 across the 14 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

20 papers

cs.LG2026

Interpreting Language Model Parameters

Lucius Bushnaq, Dan Braun, Oliver Clive-Griffin +5

Mechanistic interpretability aims to uncover how neural networks use their parameters to implement their impressive neural algorithms. Although previous work has uncovered substant…

cs.AI2026

Language Model Activations Inhabit Privileged Error-Correcting Basins

Matthew Finlayson, Francisco Pernice, Eric Todd +16

Language models exhibit remarkable robustness, continuing to produce coherent text even when their activations are perturbed by interventions like linear steering. We hypothesize t…

cs.LG2026

Functional Degeneracy in Neural Networks: Measurement and Pruning

Maria Matveev, Pascal Esser, Ayush Bharadwaj +2

A central question in modern machine learning is how much a trained model can be compressed without changing its behavior, to reduce the memory, compute and energy required to depl…

cs.CV2026

Structuring Sparsity: Block-Sparse Featurizers Capture Visual Concept Manifolds

Thomas Fel, Matthew Kowal, Mozes Jacobs +22

What is the geometry of a visual percept? The most widely used protocols for decomposing neural network representations into interpretable parts treat concepts as isolated directio…

cs.CL2025

From Memorization to Reasoning in the Spectrum of Loss Curvature

Jack Merullo, Srihita Vatsavaya, Lucius Bushnaq +1

We characterize how memorization is represented in transformer models and show that it can be disentangled in the weights of both language models (LMs) and vision transformers (ViT…

cs.LG2025

Stochastic Parameter Decomposition

Lucius Bushnaq, Dan Braun, Lee Sharkey

A key step in reverse engineering neural networks is to decompose them into simpler parts that can be studied in relative isolation. Linear parameter decomposition -- a framework t…

cs.LG2025

Identifying Sparsely Active Circuits Through Local Loss Landscape Decomposition

Brianna Chrisman, Lucius Bushnaq, Lee Sharkey

Much of mechanistic interpretability has focused on understanding the activation spaces of large neural networks. However, activation space-based approaches reveal little about the…

cs.LG2025

Interpretability in Parameter Space: Minimizing Mechanistic Description Length with Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition

Dan Braun, Lucius Bushnaq, Stefan Heimersheim +2

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the internal mechanisms learned by neural networks. Despite recent progress toward this goal, it remains unclear how best to decompo…

cs.LG2025★ 9 cited

Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability

Lee Sharkey, Bilal Chughtai, Joshua Batson +26

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the computational mechanisms underlying neural networks' capabilities in order to accomplish concrete scientific and engineering goa…

cs.CR2024★ 2 cited

Towards evaluations-based safety cases for AI scheming

Mikita Balesni, Marius Hobbhahn, David Lindner +13

We sketch how developers of frontier AI systems could construct a structured rationale -- a 'safety case' -- that an AI system is unlikely to cause catastrophic outcomes through sc…

cs.LG2024

The Local Interaction Basis: Identifying Computationally-Relevant and Sparsely Interacting Features in Neural Networks

Lucius Bushnaq, Stefan Heimersheim, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill +7

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the behavior of neural networks by reverse-engineering their internal computations. However, current methods struggle to find clear…

cs.LG2024

Using Degeneracy in the Loss Landscape for Mechanistic Interpretability

Lucius Bushnaq, Jake Mendel, Stefan Heimersheim +5

Mechanistic Interpretability aims to reverse engineer the algorithms implemented by neural networks by studying their weights and activations. An obstacle to reverse engineering ne…

hep-lat2023

Strange and charm contributions to the HVP from C* boundary conditions

Anian Altherr, Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos +12

We present preliminary results for the determination of the leading strange and charm quark-connected contributions to the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the muon's g…

hep-lat2022★ 1 cited

Hadronic vacuum polarization with C* boundary conditions

Anian Altherr, Roman Gruber, Lucius Bushnaq +12

We present a progress report on the calculation of the connected hadronic contribution to the muon g-2 with C* boundary conditions. For that purpose we use a QCD gauge ensemble wit…

hep-lat2022

Tuning of QCD+QED simulations with C boundary conditions

Anian Altherr, Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos +10

We give an update on the ongoing effort of the RC collaboration to generate fully dynamical QCD+QED ensembles with C boundary conditions using the openQD co…

hep-lat2022

QCD+QED simulations with C boundary conditions

Anian Altherr, Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos +10

We give an update on the ongoing effort of the RC collaboration to generate fully dynamical QCD+QED configurations with C boundary conditions using the openQ$^\star…

hep-lat2022

First results on QCD+QED with C* boundary conditions

Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos, Marco Catillo +7

Accounting for isospin-breaking corrections is critical for achieving subpercent precision in lattice computations of hadronic observables. A way to include QED and strong-isospin-…

hep-lat2022

Implementing noise reduction techniques into theOpenQ*D package

Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos, Marco Catillo +7

We present the results of testing a new technique for stochastic noise reduction in the calculation of propagators by implementing it in OpenQ*D for two ensembles with O(a) improve…

hep-lat2021

Baryon masses from full QCD+QED simulations

Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos, Marco Catillo +7

In these proceedings we present preliminary results for the masses of the proton, neutron and baryons obtained from QCD+QED lattice simulations performed with four dynamical…

hep-lat2021

An update on QCD+QED simulations with C* boundary conditions

Lucius Bushnaq, Isabel Campos, Marco Catillo +7

We present two novelties in our analysis of fully dynamical QCD+QED ensembles with C* boundary conditions. The first one is the explicit computation of the sign of the Pfaffian. We…