Mechanistic Data Attribution: Tracing the Training Origins of Interpretable LLM Units

arXiv:2601.21996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Mechanistic Interpretability has identified interpretable circuits in LLMs, their causal origins in training data remain elusive. We introduce Mechanistic Data Attribution (MDA), a scalable framework that employs Influence Functions to trace interpretable units back to specific training samples. Through extensive experiments on the Pythia family, we causally validate that targeted intervention--removing or augmenting a small fraction of high-influence samples--significantly modulates the emergence of interpretable heads, whereas r

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

This is a curated wire item. The Continuum Brief does not republish full third-party articles; this entry links to the original source.