Circuit tracing (attribution graphs)

methods / Causal Validation / Circuit tracing (attribution graphs)

Techniqueadvanced

Builds attribution graphs from sparse feature activations to trace which upstream features causally drive a downstream prediction, exposing the computational circuit behind a behavior.

Used in (2 observations)

A per-tool-pair mean-difference direction reads and switches tool choicemeasured

structure: Linear Direction, Linear Subspace · models: Gemma 3 4B Instruct, Gemma 3 4B, Gemma 3 27B Instruct, Qwen3-4B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct · paper: Tool Calling Is Linearly Readable and Steerable in Language Models

Ordered continuous concepts trace a rippled open 1D (Lissajous) manifoldmeasured

structure: 1D continuum manifold · models: Gemma-2-2B, EmbeddingGemma, word2vec (trained on Wikipedia), Claude 3.5 Haiku · paper: Symmetry in Language Statistics Shapes the Geometry of Model Representations, When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task