ADAG: Automatically Describing Attribution Graphs
Aryaman Arora · Zhengxuan Wu · Jacob Steinhardt · Sarah Schwettmann
We introduce an end-to-end system for interpreting language model circuits for arbitrary behaviours.
摘要
In language model interpretability research, **circuit tracing** aims to identify which internal features causally contributed to a particular output and how they affected each other, with the goal of explaining the computations underlying some behaviour. However, all prior circuit tracing work has relied on ad-hoc human interpretation of the role that each feature in the circuit plays, via manual inspection of data artifacts such as the dataset examples the component activates on. We introduce **ADAG**, an end-to-end pipeline for describing these attribution graphs which is fully automated. To achieve this, we introduce *attribution profiles* which quantify the functional role of a feature via its input and output gradient effects. We then introduce a novel clustering algorithm for grouping features, and an LLM explainer--simulator setup which generates and scores natural-language explanations of the functional role of these feature groups. We run our system on known human-analysed circuit-tracing tasks and recover interpretable circuits, and further show ADAG can find steerable clusters which are responsible for a harmful advice jailbreak in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct.