You ablated a head and the model got worse at everything
You are investigating which attention head implements a name-copying behaviour in GPT-2 medium. You zero-ablate head 9.6 and the behaviour degrades substantially: the logit difference between the correct and incorrect name falls by 2.1.
You also notice that on a set of unrelated control prompts, average loss rises by 0.4. And when you ablate a randomly chosen head instead, the target logit difference falls by 0.3 and control loss rises by 0.15.
You are about to write that head 9.6 implements name copying.
What can you legitimately conclude from this evidence, what can you not, and what experiments would you need before that claim is defensible? Be specific about what each additional experiment rules out.
Choose how you want to be interrogated
The same case under two modes is two different exercises. If you are unsure, RCA drill is the one that trains root-cause analysis most directly.
RCA drill
A symptom, and nothing else. Find the cause and prove it.
Trains: Hypothesis generation, ranking by prior, and naming the test that discriminates.
Red team
You propose. It attacks. It is trying to make you wrong.
Trains: Defending a position under pressure, and noticing when you should concede.
Socratic
Questions only. It will never tell you the answer.
Trains: Deriving from first principles instead of retrieving from memory.
Design review
Present an architecture. Justify every trade-off you made.
Trains: Stating what you optimised and what you gave up, on purpose.
Viva
Rapid escalating questions. Ends in a graded verdict.
Trains: Answering under time pressure without hedging.
Integration
Problems that span several domains at once. The hardest mode.
Trains: Reasoning across boundaries, where the cause is in a different system to the symptom.
Before you start: you begin locked. The Mentor will give you nothing — not a nudge, not a category — until you state a specific position and the mechanism you think produces it. Four genuine attempts unlock the resolution. There is no shortcut.