A causally-validated Diffusion Steering Lens tracks real head-ablation effects in a ViT

Takatsuki et al. apply the Diffusion Steering Lens, an interpolate-toward-clean-then-patch causal-readout, to CLIP ViT-bigG/14, extending logit-lens-style diagnostics to a real vision transformer [takatsuki-etal-2025-diffusion-steering-lens] DSL's per-head visualization similarity correlates more strongly with the actual output change from ablating that head than a vanilla Diffusion Lens does [takatsuki-etal-2025-diffusion-steering-lens] DSL's sequential head-ablation trajectory for removing a synthetic overlay nearly overlaps an ACDC-style optimal ablation ordering and consistently beats random ablation [takatsuki-etal-2025-diffusion-steering-lens] The paper measures a readout method's faithfulness to real causal structure rather than characterizing a novel intrinsic representation shape [takatsuki-etal-2025-diffusion-steering-lens]