arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-07-18
Cost Accounting for Reactive Computational Graphs: Exhaustive Sweeps, Sequential Mutation, and the Backward-Locality Gap
Exhaustive site-by-site interventions on a neural network's computational graph -- activation-patching sweeps, circuit-discovery searches, systematic ablation studies -- mutate the graph at every candidate site, and their cost is dominated by recomputation after each mutation. On…