arXiv:2512.24842cs.CLstat.ML2025-12

用跨语言一致性检验机制解释,避免假阳性结论。

Triangulation as an Acceptance Rule for Multilingual Mechanistic Interpretability

  • 提出三角验证法:需满足必要性、充分性与跨语言稳定性
  • 在多语言环境下验证电路解释,显著降低虚假解释率
  • 适合关注模型可解释性与跨文化泛化能力的研究者

多语言语言模型虽整体性能强,但在不同语言、文字和文化中表现常不可预测。我们主张机制解释应满足因果标准:解释需经得住因果干预,且在扰动表层形式但保留语义的环境中保持一致。我们形式化了‘参考族’(即语义不变的变体),并引入‘三角验证’作为接受规则:要求解释具备必要性(删除电路导致行为下降)、充分性(修复激活可转移行为)、不变性(两效应在参考族中方向稳定且幅度足够)。通过自动电路发现获取候选子图,并以三角验证进行筛选。三角验证基于因果抽象,视为对交换干预分布的近似变换评分,连接实用解释目标,并在多个模型族、语言对和任务上建立对比实验协议。该方法为机制性声明提供可证伪标准,过滤掉仅通过单环境测试却在跨语言中失效的虚假电路。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multilingual language models achieve strong aggregate performance yet often behave unpredictably across languages, scripts, and cultures. We argue that mechanistic explanations for such models should satisfy a \emph{causal} standard: claims must survive causal interventions and must \emph{cross-reference} across environments that perturb surface form while preserving meaning. We formalize \emph{reference families} as predicate-preserving variants and introduce \emph{triangulation}, an acceptance rule requiring necessity (ablating the circuit degrades the target behavior), sufficiency (patching activations transfers the behavior), and invariance (both effects remain directionally stable and of sufficient magnitude across the reference family). To supply candidate subgraphs, we adopt automatic circuit discovery and \emph{accept or reject} those candidates by triangulation. We ground triangulation in causal abstraction by casting it as an approximate transformation score over a distribution of interchange interventions, connect it to the pragmatic interpretability agenda, and present a comparative experimental protocol across multiple model families, language pairs, and tasks. Triangulation provides a falsifiable standard for mechanistic claims that filters spurious circuits passing single-environment tests but failing cross-lingual invariance.

可解释性多语言因果推理

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