MIB: A Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark

How can we know whether new mechanistic interpretability methods achieve real improvements? In pursuit of meaningful and lasting evaluation standards, we propose MIB, a benchmark with two tracks spanning four tasks and five models. MIB favors methods that precisely and concisely recover relevant causal pathways or specific causal variables in neural language models. The circuit localization track compares methods that locate the model components - and connections between them - most important for performing a task (e.g., attribution patching or information flow routes). The causal variable localization track compares methods that featurize a hidden vector, e.g., sparse autoencoders (SAEs) or distributed alignment search (DAS), and locate model features for a causal variable relevant to the task. Using MIB, we find that attribution and mask optimization methods perform best on circuit localization. For causal variable localization, we find that the supervised DAS method performs best, while SAE features are not better than neurons, i.e., standard dimensions of hidden vectors. These findings illustrate that MIB enables meaningful comparisons of methods, and increases our confidence that there has been real progress in the field.

@article{mueller2025_2504.13151,
  title={ MIB: A Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark },
  author={ Aaron Mueller and Atticus Geiger and Sarah Wiegreffe and Dana Arad and Iván Arcuschin and Adam Belfki and Yik Siu Chan and Jaden Fiotto-Kaufman and Tal Haklay and Michael Hanna and Jing Huang and Rohan Gupta and Yaniv Nikankin and Hadas Orgad and Nikhil Prakash and Anja Reusch and Aruna Sankaranarayanan and Shun Shao and Alessandro Stolfo and Martin Tutek and Amir Zur and David Bau and Yonatan Belinkov },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13151},
  year={ 2025 }
}