Mechanistic interpretability

Machine learning and data mining
Part of a series on
Paradigms Supervised learning Unsupervised learning Semi-supervised learning Self-supervised learning Reinforcement learning Meta-learning Online learning Batch learning Curriculum learning Rule-based learning Neuro-symbolic AI Neuromorphic engineering Quantum machine learning
Problems Classification Generative modeling Regression Clustering Dimensionality reduction Density estimation Anomaly detection Data cleaning AutoML Association rules Semantic analysis Structured prediction Feature engineering Feature learning Learning to rank Grammar induction Ontology learning Multimodal learning
Supervised learning (classification • regression) Apprenticeship learning Decision trees Ensembles Bagging Boosting Random forest k-NN Linear regression Naive Bayes Artificial neural networks Logistic regression Perceptron Relevance vector machine (RVM) Support vector machine (SVM)
Clustering BIRCH CURE Hierarchical k-means Fuzzy Expectation–maximization (EM) DBSCAN OPTICS Mean shift
Dimensionality reduction Factor analysis CCA ICA LDA NMF PCA PGD t-SNE SDL
Structured prediction Graphical models Bayes net Conditional random field Hidden Markov
Anomaly detection RANSAC k-NN Local outlier factor Isolation forest
Neural networks Autoencoder Deep learning Feedforward neural network Recurrent neural network LSTM GRU ESN reservoir computing Boltzmann machine Restricted GAN Diffusion model SOM Convolutional neural network U-Net LeNet AlexNet DeepDream Neural field Neural radiance field Physics-informed neural networks Transformer Vision Mamba Spiking neural network Memtransistor Electrochemical RAM (ECRAM)
Reinforcement learning Q-learning Policy gradient SARSA Temporal difference (TD) Multi-agent Self-play
Learning with humans Active learning Crowdsourcing Human-in-the-loop Mechanistic interpretability RLHF
Model diagnostics Coefficient of determination Confusion matrix Learning curve ROC curve
Mathematical foundations Kernel machines Bias–variance tradeoff Computational learning theory Empirical risk minimization Occam learning PAC learning Statistical learning VC theory Topological deep learning
Journals and conferences AAAI ECML PKDD NeurIPS ICML ICLR IJCAI ML JMLR
Related articles Glossary of artificial intelligence List of datasets for machine-learning research List of datasets in computer vision and image processing Outline of machine learning

Mechanistic interpretability (often abbreviated as mech interp, mechinterp, or MI) is a subfield of research within explainable artificial intelligence that aims to understand the internal workings of neural networks by analyzing the mechanisms present in their computations. The approach seeks to analyze neural networks in a manner similar to how binary computer programs can be reverse-engineered to understand their functions.