Journal article
Circuits Are Estimates, Not Mechanisms: A Recovered Subgraph Is One Draw From a Class Set by the Ablation, the Dataset and the Grain, the Results That Defend Circuits Hold at the Level of That Class, and What Ablation Evidence Licenses at Each Level
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. A circuit in a language model is usually presented as the mechanism by which the model performs a task: a sparse subgraph, found by ablation or patching, that reproduces the behaviour when everything else is knocked out. A second body of work…