Preprint
Written Is Not Kept: What a Single-Layer Readout of the Residual Stream Licenses When Adjacent Layers Undo Part of Each Other's Writes, Why Cancellation and Iterative Refinement Are Not Rival Findings, and the Persistence Check Interpretability Claims Skip
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Life of Research Most feature-based interpretability reads a transformer one layer at a time. A probe, a lens or a sparse dictionary is fitted to the residual stream, or to one layer's output, at a chosen depth, and what it finds there is…