Mechanistic Interpretability papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Mechanistic Interpretability went from 17 papers in 2023 to 138 in 2026, roughly 8.1x in three years.
• ICML publishes the most Mechanistic Interpretability work: 119 papers from 2023 to 2026, 38% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with Deep learning · large language models: papers tagged with both rose from 1 in 2023 to 23 in 2026.
• Among the 5 topics under Interpretability, it ranks #2 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Feature Attribution, is up 1.9x versus 8.1x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026A Mechanistic Interpretability Study of an Astronomical Foundation Model
• ICML 2026Contribution Weights: A Geometrical Analysis of Self-Attention Transformers
• ICLR 2026Circuit Insights: Towards Interpretability Beyond Activations
• CVPR 2026CIGMA Causal Information-Gain Mechanistic Attribution of Attention Heads in Vision
• NeurIPS 2025Beyond Components: Singular Vector-Based Interpretability of Transformer Circuits
• ICML 2025Algorithm Development in Neural Networks: Insights from the Streaming Parity Task
• ICLR 2025Arithmetic Without Algorithms: Language Models Solve Math with a Bag of Heuristics
• CVPR 2025Dissecting and Mitigating Diffusion Bias via Mechanistic Interpretability
• NeurIPS 2024InterpBench: Semi-Synthetic Transformers for Evaluating Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques
• ICML 2024Mechanistic Neural Networks for Scientific Machine Learning
• ICLR 2024Fine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking
• CVPR 2024SI-MIL: Taming Deep MIL for Self-Interpretability in Gigapixel Histopathology
• NeurIPS 2023A Logic for Expressing Log-Precision Transformers
• ICML 2023Mechanistic Mode Connectivity
• ICLR 2023Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 Small
• NeurIPS 2026Discovering Mechanistic Models of Neural Activity: System Identification in an in Silico Zebrafish
• ICML 2026CorrSteer: Generation-Time LLM Steering via Correlated Sparse Autoencoder Features
• ICLR 2026CLUE: Conflict-guided Localization for LLM Unlearning Framework
• CVPR 2026From Weights to Concepts Data-Free Interpretability of CLIP via Singular
• NeurIPS 2025Bigram Subnetworks: Mapping to Next Tokens in Transformer Language Models

All Mechanistic Interpretability papers

138 papers, page 3 of 3

101. ICML 2026RouterInterp: Understanding Superposed Specialisation in Mixture of Experts Routing
102. ICML 2026Safety Anchor: Defending Harmful Fine-tuning via Geometric Bottlenecks
103. ICML 2026Seeing to Generalize: How Visual Data Corrects Binding Shortcuts
104. ICML 2026Shared Lexical Task Representations Explain Behavioral Variability In LLMs
105. ICML 2026Singular Vectors of Attention Heads Align with Features
106. ICML 2026Spurious Rewards Paradox: Mechanistically Understanding How RLVR Activates Memorization Shortcuts in LLMs
107. ICML 2026SVD as a Fast Interpretability Method for Transformers
108. ICML 2026Symmetries in language statistics shape the geometry of model representations
109. ICML 2026Syntax vs. Semantics: How Transformers Learn Deep Dependencies
110. ICML 2026Temporal Context Reinstatement Drives Episodic-Like Order Memory in Long-Context Language Models
111. ICML 2026Textual Supervision Enhances Geospatial Representations in Vision-Language Models
112. ICML 2026The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust
113. ICML 2026The Cylindrical Representation Hypothesis for Language Model Steering
114. ICML 2026The Geometry of Representational Failures in Vision Language Models
115. ICML 2026The Mechanistic Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Language Models
116. ICML 2026The Truth Lies Somewhere in the Middle (of the Generated Tokens)
117. ICML 2026Tracing the Persona Circuit: How Large Language Models Encode and Express Character Traits
118. ICML 2026Translation Heads: Disentangling meaning from language in LLM-based machine translation
119. ICML 2026Uncovering Grounding IDs: How External Cues Shape Multi-Modal Binding
120. ICML 2026Weights to Code: Extracting Interpretable Algorithms from the Discrete Transformer
121. ICML 2026WET: Mitigating World-Conditioned Knowledge Conflicts via World Entropy Tethering
122. ICML 2026What Makes Effective Supervision in Latent Chain-of-Thought: An Information-Theoretic Analysis
123. NeurIPS 2026A Mechanistic Interpretability Study of an Astronomical Foundation Model
124. NeurIPS 2026A Unifying Perspective on Language Model Interpretability
125. NeurIPS 2026Assign and Add: A Mechanistic Study of Compositional Arithmetic
126. NeurIPS 2026Circuit-Level Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models
127. NeurIPS 2026Discovering Mechanistic Models of Neural Activity: System Identification in an in Silico Zebrafish
128. NeurIPS 2026Geometry-Adaptive Explainer for Faithful Dictionary-Based Interpretability under Distribution Shift
129. NeurIPS 2026How Do Language Models Understand Tables? A Mechanistic Analysis of Cell Location
130. NeurIPS 2026How do Small Transformer Models Learn Hard Math Tasks?
131. NeurIPS 2026Instruction Anchor: Dissecting the Mechanistic Dynamics of Modality Arbitration
132. NeurIPS 2026OceanCBM: A Concept Bottleneck Model for Mechanistic Interpretability in Ocean Forecasting
133. NeurIPS 2026On the Recall Scaling Laws in Mamba: A Theoretical and Mechanistic Study via Hashing
134. NeurIPS 2026Patching Up Circuit Learning on Images
135. NeurIPS 2026Predictive Concept Decoders: Training Scalable End-to-End Interpretability Assistants
136. NeurIPS 2026Structural Support Certificates for Mechanistic Hypothesis Selection
137. NeurIPS 2026The parameters in weight-sparse transformers are interpretable
138. NeurIPS 2026The Unembedding Bottleneck: A Mechanistic Analysis of Single Digit Counting in LLMs

FAQ

How many Mechanistic Interpretability papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

311 in total: 17 in 2023, 49 in 2024, 107 in 2025, 138 in 2026.

How many Mechanistic Interpretability papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 16 Mechanistic Interpretability papers, versus 34 the year before.

How many Mechanistic Interpretability papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 46 Mechanistic Interpretability papers, versus 38 the year before.

How many Mechanistic Interpretability papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 74 Mechanistic Interpretability papers, versus 33 the year before.

How many Mechanistic Interpretability papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 2 Mechanistic Interpretability papers, versus 2 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Mechanistic Interpretability papers?

ICML, with 119 papers from 2023 to 2026.