Symbolic Mechanistic Data Attribution: Tracing Training Influence to Learned Behavioral Policies
arXiv:2606.29171v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While existing data attribution methods can identify which training examples build specific mechanistic circuits, they cannot explain how training data shapes the behavioral decisions a model learns. We introduce Symbolic Mechanistic Data Attribution (SMDA), a framework that attributes training pairs to the interpretable symbolic policies governing model behavior. SMDA fits a closed-form Ridge regression over sparse autoencoder (SAE) fea…