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Denis Sutter

dblp:412/8827 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
1 paper
Trustworthy machine learning · 70% Representation and self-supervised learning · 23% Language models and text generation · 7%

Topics — the 5 heaviest of 5, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability › mechanistic interpretability
causal abstraction
0.912025
The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability? · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
interpretability
0.912025
The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability? · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation analysis
linear representation hypothesis
0.912025
The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability? · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability
mechanistic interpretability
0.912025
The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability? · NeurIPS 2025
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
language model analysis
0.312025
The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability? · NeurIPS 2025

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

interchange intervention · 0.9causal abstraction · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability?
abstract
The concept of causal abstraction got recently popularised to demystify the opaque decision-making processes of machine learning models; in short, a neural network can be abstracted as a higher-level algorithm if there exists a function which allows us to map between them. Notably, most interpretability papers implement these maps as linear functions, motivated by the linear representation hypothesis: the idea that features are encoded linearly in a model's representations. However, this linearity constraint is not required by the definition of causal abstraction. In this work, we critically examine the concept of causal abstraction by considering arbitrarily powerful alignment maps. In particular, we prove that under reasonable assumptions, any neural network can be mapped to any algorithm, rendering this unrestricted notion of causal abstraction trivial and uninformative. We complement these theoretical findings with empirical evidence, demonstrating that it is possible to perfectly map models to algorithms even when these models are incapable of solving the actual task; e.g., on an experiment using randomly initialised language models, our alignment maps reach 100\% interchange-intervention accuracy on the indirect object identification task. This raises the non-linear representation dilemma: if we lift the linearity constraint imposed to alignment maps in causal abstraction analyses, we are left with no principled way to balance the inherent trade-off between these maps' complexity and accuracy. Together, these results suggest an answer to our title's question: causal abstraction is not enough for mechanistic interpretability, as it becomes vacuous without assumptions about how models encode information. Studying the connection between this information-encoding assumption and causal abstraction should lead to exciting future work.
Denis Sutter, Julian Minder, Thomas Hofmann 0001, Tiago Pimentel
NeurIPS1