Research software
thatDangCircuit v1.0.0 — compound binding is distributed
Published July 26, 2026 · v1.0.0
Abstract
A negative localization result for noun-noun compound binding across GPT-2 and Pythia — probed by head ablation, residual-stream cosine, and projection steering. Binding proves distributed and redundant rather than circuit-localized: ablating the top-scoring heads shifts it by roughly 1%, with compensation elsewhere in the network, and the pre-registered steering prediction was falsified. The redundancy is the finding.
The accompanying artifact records a negative localization result for noun-noun compound binding across GPT-2 and Pythia. Head ablation, residual-stream cosine, and projection steering do not support a small, fixed causal circuit.
The result instead supports a distributed and redundant account: ablating the top-scoring heads produces only a small shift, with compensation elsewhere in the network.