提出新方法揭示Transformer中被隐藏的备份机制,让失效组件重见天日。
Conditional Co-Ablation: Recovering Self-Repair Backups in Transformer Circuits

- 通过条件共消融技术,检测主组件移除后备份的补偿作用
- 在GPT-2-small IOI任务中将备份头识别准确率从0.33提升至0.91
- 无需标签即可发现关键修复路径,适合模型可解释性研究者
机制可解释性常依赖组件级干预来发现模型行为的产生方式。传统单个单元消融评分在组件重要性叠加时合理,但在Transformer存在自修复时失效:主组件移除后,休眠备份会接管任务,使主组件影响被掩盖,而备份本身在完整模型中看似无关。本文将此问题重构为恢复任务,提出无标签、输出驱动的条件共消融(CoAx)方法,衡量主组件移除后其余单元消融效果的增长程度,从而揭示被忽略的二阶交互。在GPT-2-small IOI电路中,CoAx将备份头恢复的ROC-AUC从0.33提升至0.91,优于所有基线(包括自修复感知梯度评分,最高0.82);反事实拼接验证了恢复出的头具有因果修复作用。该方法无需标签,可迁移至八种不同模型的归纳任务。除了发现备份,该方法还能纠正自修复掩盖的归因偏差,识别能力消融所需组件,并实现从124M到7B参数规模的修复感知结构化剪枝。因此,组件重要性并非孤立属性:在健壮电路中,真正关键的组件只有在使其必要时才显现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mechanistic interpretability often relies on component-level interventions to discover how a model produces a behavior. This guides attribution, capability knockout, and model pruning downstream to operate by scoring each unit by the effect of ablation in isolation. Such first-order scoring is natural when component importance is additive, but becomes misleading when a transformer self-repairs: after a primary component is removed, a dormant backup can take over, muting the primary's measured effect while the backup itself appears irrelevant on the intact model. We recast this failure as a recovery task, conditional circuit completion, and introduce Conditional Co-Ablation (CoAx), a label-free, output-grounded score that asks how much each remaining unit's ablation effect grows once a primary set has been removed. This conditional growth exposes the second-order interaction that single-unit scores discard. On the GPT-2-small IOI circuit, CoAx raises backup-head recovery from 0.33 to 0.91 ROC-AUC, outperforming all baselines, including self-repair-aware gradient scores (best 0.82); counterfactual patching verifies that the recovered heads causally carry the repair. The same label-free procedure transfers to induction across eight models. Beyond discovery, the recovered backups correct self-repair-masked attribution, identify the components required for capability knockout, and yield repair-aware structured pruning scaling from 124M to 7B. Component importance is therefore not merely an isolated-unit property: in robust circuits, the components that matter can become visible only under the interventions that make them necessary.
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