Alaa Anani, Tobias Lorenz, Bernt Schiele, Mario Fritz, Jonas Fischer
Understanding how neural networks arrive at their predictions is essential for debugging, auditing, and deployment. Mechanistic interpretability pursues this goal by identifying circuits--minimal subnetworks responsible for specific behaviors. However, existing circuit discovery methods are brittle: circuits depend strongly on the chosen concept dataset and often fail to transfer out-of-distribution, raising doubts whether they capture the concept or merely dataset-specific artifacts. We introduce Certified Circuits, which provide provable stability guarantees for circuit discovery. Our framework wraps any black-box discovery algorithm with randomized data subsampling to certify that inclusion decisions over circuit components--neurons or edges of the model graph, depending on the base algorithm--are invariant to bounded edit-distance perturbations of the concept dataset. Unstable components are abstained from, yielding circuits that are more compact and more accurate. We validate across three architectures (ResNet, ViT, GPT-2) on vision (ImageNet and four OOD datasets) and language (IOI, IOI-Hard, Greater-Than) tasks. Certified circuits achieve up to 56% higher accuracy and up to 80% fewer components, and remain reliable where baselines degrade. Certified Circuits puts circuit discovery on formal ground by producing mechanistic explanations that are provably stable and better aligned with the target concept. Code: https://github.com/AlaaAnani/certified-circuits.
Swathi Suhas, Anurag Das, Bernt Schiele, Jonas Fischer
Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly process multiple views of the same scene, but it remains unclear whether they integrate these observations into a coherent scene-level representation. Existing multi-image evaluations do not isolate this capability, as tasks may admit correct solutions through independent per-view processing without requiring cross-view correspondence. We introduce OneScene-Bench, a controlled benchmark designed to explicitly distinguish when cross-view integration is necessary. Our benchmark evaluates three complementary capabilities on real-world multi-view scenes: unique object counting, cross-view consistency, and spatial reasoning. For counting, we control object overlap across views to separate cases solvable by simple per-view aggregation from those requiring instance-level correspondence. For consistency, we introduce localized edits in shared and view-specific regions, testing whether models distinguish genuine scene contradictions from differences caused by viewpoint and visibility. For spatial reasoning, we construct object relations that require combining spatial evidence across viewpoints to compare physical proximity. We evaluate twelve state-of-the-art open-weight and proprietary VLMs and find that counting accuracy drops substantially on complementary views, ranging from 4.5-50.0%, compared with 45.5-81.5% on complete-overlap examples. Moreover, cross-view consistency remains around 50% across models, including recent proprietary VLMs, despite substantially stronger performance on spatial reasoning. Our results reveal a substantial gap between processing multiple images and integrating evidence across them, highlighting the need for evaluations that explicitly test scene-level multi-view understanding. Code and data are available at https://github.com/swathisuhas/OneScene-Bench.