S^3martCirc: Self-supervised Smart Circuit Discovery

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks, from text summarization to question answering. Despite these capabilities, their black-box nature obscures internal decision-making processes. Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to address this by reverse-engineering neural networks into human-understandable algorithms. Current MI approaches for LLMs typically follow a two-stage paradigm: first identifying important components (circuit discovery), where components are typically individual nodes such as an attention head or feedforward neuron, and second determining the role they play in a certain task (functional interpretation). However, this sequential approach overlooks a fundamental insight: a component's importance and its functional role are inherently codependent. Unifying these stages presents two key challenges: (1) functional roles are often tied to specific nodes or components, limiting generalization, and (2) their identification relies on subjective interpretation rather than quantifiable metrics. To address these challenges, we propose S^3martCirc (Self-supervised Smart Circuit Discovery), a unified framework that simultaneously discovers circuits and interprets functionality. S^3martCirc abstracts node behavior into two general computational roles that generalize across tasks and defines a quantitative metric for assigning them, enabling importance and functional role to be discovered jointly rather than in sequence. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing methods in circuit discovery.