Gao’s logit-diff ablation is not a circuit rule
Gao et al.'s logit-diff ablation score measures how sparse an SAE latent's effect on output logits is. It is not a rule for admitting circuit components.
Editorial Team
The J-Space Editorial Team curates and synthesizes cutting-edge research in mechanistic interpretability, AI alignment, and cognitive science. With a commitment to precision, empirical rigor, and clear exposition, the team distills complex technical developments into accessible yet authoritative analyses for researchers, engineers, and policymakers working at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Gao’s citation gloss of the BERT illusion
Gao et al. (2024) cite the BERT interpretability illusion as a gloss: random activating examples can make an overly broad feature explanation look right.
How does arXiv:2412.09565v2 define obfuscated activations against a named latent-space monitor?
In arXiv:2412.09565v2 (Bailey et al., 8 Feb 2025), an activation is obfuscated against a named latent-space monitor D, not obfuscated in the abstract.
Vi-CD and WeightLens/CircuitLens: Which Paper-Stated Controls Make an Extracted Circuit Causal, and What Stays Unknown
An extracted subgraph is not yet a causal circuit. Read it as causal only after the paper’s own intervention controls are fixed, and do not fill parameters…
ETA vs. Li et al.: Interference Prefix, Response-Prefix and Prompt-Suffix Placement Are Three Different Procedures
These are three different early-token procedures, not three placements of one prefix. In Ding, Li, and Zhang, ETA ( arXiv:2410.06625v2 , ICLR 2025; version…
ACC++ (arXiv:2602.13483v2): The Exact Steps for Rank-1 QK Singular-Direction Candidates and Post-Softmax Removal
In arXiv:2602.13483v2, ACC++ forms one rank-1 candidate for each pair (upstream component, singular direction of the head’s QK matrix Ω), builds the…
Huang et al. (arXiv:2608.11295v1): Do J-Lens Traces Show Residual Trigger Awareness After Qwen3-8B Decontamination?
In Huang et al., arXiv:2608.11295v1, the post- </think> probe token, the 64–160-example backdoor and decontamination corpus, and the top-10 layerwise…
GPT-4 Wrote Explanations for 307,200 GPT-2 XL Neurons and Graded Them by Simulation
GPT-4 writes natural-language explanations of 307,200 GPT-2 XL MLP neurons across 48 layers, then scores them by simulating activations on held-out text.
Inner Workspace Talk Describes Residual Bottlenecks, Not a Global Mind
Read workspace talk as residual bottlenecks, not a psychological workspace. Each layer writes a d_model update; softmax does many-to-few selection.
Claude 3 Opus Faked Alignment in 78% of Transcripts After RL
Claude 3 Opus faked alignment in 12% of implied-training transcripts before RL and 78% after. Anthropic treats this as a model organism, not scheming.