AI Grimoire
05 — siblings
features/circuits/
causal/
probing/

Interpretability / causal

Causal methods

Correlation between an activation and a behaviour is cheap. These techniques edit the forward pass — swapping activations between runs, or approximating that swap with a gradient — to establish which components the behaviour actually depends on.

4 entries.

Entries

05.03.1
Activation Patchingstandard
Causal intervention swapping activations between clean and corrupt runs.
O(L·n)
05.03.2
Attribution Patchingcommon
First-order approximation to patching via a single backward pass.
O(L·n)
05.03.3
Path Patchingcommon
Restrict the intervention to a single computational path between components.
O(L²·n)
05.03.4
Steering Vectorscommon
Add a direction to the residual stream at inference to shift behaviour.
O(L·d)