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Post-Training Compressed the Causal Circuit

Circuit Condensation prunes low-attribution edges and retrains through what remains, accepting cuts only when behavior and general capability survive.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-08-29-007
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Summary

Circuit Condensation prunes low-attribution edges and retrains through what remains, accepting cuts only when behavior and general capability survive.

Across four behaviors and eight models, condensed circuits were smaller than the strongest frozen-discovery baseline in 30 of 32 settings, by 8.1 times on average and as much as 316 times. Exhaustive subset tests found some circuits irreducible and others still carrying removable edges. The result offers more inspectable mechanisms, but only for the studied behaviors and models.

Why it matters

Circuit Condensation prunes low-attribution edges and retrains through what remains, accepting cuts only when behavior and general capability survive.

Limits and context

  • The result offers more inspectable mechanisms, but only for the studied behaviors and models.

Key claims

  1. Circuit Condensation prunes low-attribution edges and retrains through what remains, accepting cuts only when behavior and general capability survive.

    Qualification: The result offers more inspectable mechanisms, but only for the studied behaviors and models.

    Evidence: source-2026-08-29-007

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2608.27254arXiv · primary research

Corrections

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