Paper

Many Circuits, One Mechanism: Input Variation and Evaluation Granularity in Circuit Discovery

arXiv:2606.06267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit discovery methods identify subgraphs that explain specific model behaviors, and structural differences between discovered circuits are commonly interpreted as evidence of distinct mechanisms. We test this assumption by varying input statistics while holding the task fixed, and show that the resulting structural differences exhibit apparent specialization but do not correspond to functional differences, a pattern we term phantom specialization. Using Literal Sequence Copying across four token-frequency bands plus a control condition in fi…

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