{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/transformer-circuit-faithfulness-metrics-are","title":"Transformer Circuit Faithfulness Metrics are not Robust","arxiv_id":"2407.08734","date":"2024-07-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Joseph Miller","Bilal Chughtai","William Saunders"],"abstract":"Mechanistic interpretability work attempts to reverse engineer the learned algorithms present inside neural networks. One focus of this work has been to discover 'circuits' -- subgraphs of the full model that explain behaviour on specific tasks. But how do we measure the performance of such circuits? Prior work has attempted to measure circuit 'faithfulness' -- the degree to which the circuit replicates the performance of the full model. In this work, we survey many considerations for designing experiments that measure circuit faithfulness by ablating portions of the model's computation. Concerningly, we find existing methods are highly sensitive to seemingly insignificant changes in the ablation methodology. We conclude that existing circuit faithfulness scores reflect both the methodological choices of researchers as well as the actual components of the circuit - the task a circuit is required to perform depends on the ablation used to test it. The ultimate goal of mechanistic interpretability work is to understand neural networks, so we emphasize the need for more clarity in the precise claims being made about circuits. We open source a library at https://github.com/UFO-101/auto-circuit that includes highly efficient implementations of a wide range of ablation methodologies and circuit discovery algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08734v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.08734v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"transformer-circuit-faithfulness-metrics-are","repo_url":"https://github.com/ufo-101/auto-circuit","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"},{"method_slug":null,"method_name":"Library"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2407.08734","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2407.08734","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2407.08734"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/ufo-101/auto-circuit","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"14da4201191874b5","entry":"collate_fn","repo":"ufo-101/auto-circuit","repo_kind":"official","path":"auto_circuit/data.py","file_url":"https://github.com/ufo-101/auto-circuit/blob/HEAD/auto_circuit/data.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"14da4201191874b5"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}