hendel-no-mechanism-explanation
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/hendel-2023-icl-task-vectors-s8-conclusions.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:58:04+00:00
Hendel et al. explicitly do not provide a mechanistic explanation of how the transformer internally constructs θ from S or how θ is used to compute output logits.
Summary
The Hendel et al. paper tells us what the transformer does at the input and output level but stops short of explaining the internal steps that connect the two. This leaves a gap: we can treat their result as a reliable observation, but we cannot use it to understand or predict how the model's internal representations are built or transformed into final predictions.