Papers › Compact Proofs of Model Performance via Mechanistic Interpretability

Compact Proofs of Model Performance via Mechanistic Interpretability

17 Jun 2024arXiv:2406.11779archive 2025-07-28

Jason Gross, Rajashree Agrawal, Thomas Kwa, Euan Ong, Chun Hei Yip, Alex Gibson, Soufiane Noubir, Lawrence Chan

We propose using mechanistic interpretability -- techniques for reverse engineering model weights into human-interpretable algorithms -- to derive and compactly prove formal guarantees on model performance. We prototype this approach by formally proving lower bounds on the accuracy of 151 small transformers trained on a Max-of-K task. We create 102 different computer-assisted proof strategies and assess their length and tightness of bound on each of our models. Using quantitative metrics, we find that shorter proofs seem to require and provide more mechanistic understanding. Moreover, we find that more faithful mechanistic understanding leads to tighter performance bounds. We confirm these connections by qualitatively examining a subset of our proofs. Finally, we identify compounding structureless noise as a key challenge for using mechanistic interpretability to generate compact proofs on model performance.

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