Morning Edition · Wednesday, August 5, 2026Published at 1:48 AM EDT · New York

Researchers Automate the Manual Step That Slows Circuit Tracing

A new pipeline uses language models to group features and neurons into supernodes, the labeling work that has made interpretability studies expensive to scale.

Circuit tracing reveals how a language model computes an answer by mapping the features it uses into an attribution graph. The technique's practical limit has never been the tracing itself but the human labor after it, because someone must…