How to use and interpret activation patching

Stefan Heimersheim; Neel Nanda

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arXiv · 2404.15255

How to use and interpret activation patching

Stefan Heimersheim·Neel Nanda

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Abstract

Activation patching is a popular mechanistic interpretability technique, but has many subtleties regarding how it is applied and how one may interpret the results. We provide a summary of advice and best practices, based on our experience using this technique in practice. We include an overview of the different ways to apply activation patching and a discussion on how to interpret the results. We focus on what evidence patching experiments provide about circuits, and on the choice of metric and associated pitfalls.

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Stefan Heimersheim, Neel Nanda. 2024-04-23. How to use and interpret activation patching. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15255

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