Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools

This type of stuff is really important in my opinion. Getting this type of stuff open sourced allows academics and other researchers to try and do this type of interpretability research on a more level playing field.

I think the more people looking at this the better. I have a feeling there will be some breakthroughs in identifying important circuits and being able to make more efficient model architectures that are bootstrapped from some identified primitives.

Anthropic employees Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken did an interview recently with Dwarkesh Patel, pieces here and there was about the circuit tracing insights.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-trenton-2 -- search the transcript for "circuit" for the quick bits.

Eg, "If you look at the circuit, you can see that it's not actually doing any of the math, it's paying attention to that you think the answer's four and then it's reasoning backwards about how it can manipulate the intermediate computation to give you an answer of four."

https://transformer-circuits.pub/

Hi, paper author here.

This is a new tool which relies on existing introspection libraries like TransformerLens (which is similar in spirit to Garcon) to build an attribution graph. This graph displays intermediate computational steps the model took to sample a token.

For more details on the method, see this paper: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met....

For examples of using it to study Gemma 2, check out the linked notebooks: https://github.com/safety-research/circuit-tracer/blob/main/...)

We also document some findings on Claude 3.5 Haiku here: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...)

Imported the graph json into Neo4j

Have fun

https://gist.github.com/jexp/8d991d1e543c5a576a3f1ee70132ce7...

Curious if we say "thank you", the model will be more activated and result in better answer. ^^