cs.LGOct 14, 2025

Attribution Graphs and Causal Probing for Mechanistic Discovery and Bias Repair in Multimodal Generative Learning

Authors: Noor Islam S. MohammadUluğ Bayazıt

Organizations: 1,2Istanbul Technical University

Abstract

We treat the internals of generative models as mechanistic objects rather than black boxes. We introduce \textbf{Attribution Graphs} (AGs), which extend GradCAM++ to circuit-level representations, and \textbf{Causal Probing}, a do-calculus intervention method for identifying causal latent structures, enabling detection and correction of spurious correlations, demographic biases, and misaligned decision circuits during training. We further propose the \textbf{Cognitive Alignment Score (CAS)}, quantifying agreement between model-internal representations and human concepts, a \textbf{saliency-first privacy mechanism} sharing only thresholded attribution nodes, a bias-aware regularizer aligning subgroup statistics, and a Reveal-to-Revise loop integrating attribution signals into parameter updates without separate fine-tuning. Evaluated on CelebA, FairFace, Jigsaw, and HateXplain, our method achieves \textbf{94.1%} accuracy, \textbf{92.3%} macro F1, \textbf{79.4%} IoU-XAI, and \textbf{12.7} FID at 72--76% adversarial robustness, while reducing subgroup disparity ΔbiasΔ_{\mathrm{bias}} by \textbf{41%}, demonstrating that mechanistic interpretability, fairness, and generative performance can be jointly optimized.

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