When Do Attention-Head Ablations Support Causal Claims? Projection-Level Confounds, Floor Effects, and Matched Controls

arXiv:2610.00373 · cs.LG, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-30

Updated: 2026-09-30

Comments: Code available in the accompanying repository. 2 figures

Code: https://github.com/TheClassicTechno/InterpretabilityNLPProject

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Ablation — 22× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 15× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Transformer — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 3× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Robustness — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Activation Patching — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• In-Context Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Tokenization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• In-context Learning and Induction Heads

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