This post represents my personal hot takes, not the opinions of my team or employer. This is a massively updated version of a similar list I made two years ago

There’s a lot of mechanistic interpretability papers, and more come out all the time. This can be pretty intimidating if you’re new to the field! To try helping out, here's a reading list of my favourite mech interp papers: papers which I think are important to be aware of, often worth skimming, and something worth reading deeply (time permitting). I’ve annotated these with my key takeaways, what I like about each paper, which bits to deeply engage with vs skim, etc. I wrote a similar post 2 years ago, but a lot has changed since then, thus v2!

Note that this is not trying to be a comprehensive literature review - this is my answer to “if you have limited time and want to get up to speed on the field as fast as you can, what should you do”. I’m deliberately not following academic norms like necessarily citing the first paper introducing something, or all papers doing some work, and am massively biased towards recent work that is more relevant to the cutting edge. I also shamelessly recommend a bunch of my own work here, and probably haven't always clearly indicated which papers I was involved in, sorry!

How to read this post: I've bolded the most important papers to read, which I recommend prioritising. All of the papers are annotated with my interpretation and key takeaways, and tbh I think reading that may be comparable good to skimming the paper. And there's far too many papers to read all of them deeply unless you want to make that a significant priority. I recommend reading all my summaries, noting the papers and areas that excite you, and then trying to dive deeply into those.

Foundational Work

A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits (Nelson Elhage et al, Anthropic) - absolute classic, foundational ideas for how to think about transformers. See my youtube tutorial (I hear this is best watched after reading the paper, and adds additional clarity).

Deeply engage with:
- All the ideas in the overview section, especially:
  - Understanding the residual stream and why it’s fundamental.
  - The notion of interpreting paths between interpretable bits (eg input tokens and output logits) where the path is a composition of matrices and how this is different from interpreting eve

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Lucas Xie

Lucas Xie