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Decision making often requires balancing exploitation of familiar options with exploration of uncertain alternatives. One strategy for exploration is random exploration, in which choices become more variable and less tied to the option that currently appears best. However, it remains unclear whether this variability reflects genuine stochasticity or instead a deterministic structure that traditional cognitive models fail to capture. We examined this question using the Horizon Task in an aggregated dataset of 1,392 participants completing over 1,270,695 trials. In this task, exploration becomes more valuable when participants have more future choices, and choice variability increases under longer horizons. We tested whether more expressive neural network models could recover deterministic structure from this additional variability. Although neural networks provided better overall fits to behavior than the traditional model, long-horizon choices remained consistently less predictable than short-horizon choices. These findings show that limited model expressiveness cannot fully account for the increased variability associated with random exploration, suggesting random exploration truly is substantially random.

Neural networks are increasingly studied not merely as predictive systems, but as complex systems whose internal computations are themselves objects of scientific inquiry. Recent progress in mechanistic interpretability (MI) has made it possible to identify neurons, features, circuits, population structures, and dynamical patterns associated with model behavior. As these tools improve, attention is shifting from what can be observed inside a model to how those observations support mechanistic explanations. We examine the parallel efforts of neuroscience and MI to address this question and identify recurring inferential bottlenecks when inferring mechanisms from complex neural systems. We propose five principles and organize them into a recursive logic for a more rigorous procedure of mechanistic inference. These principles provide a framework that supports scientific discovery in two senses: it helps turn local interpretability findings into cumulative knowledge of mechanisms within models, and it makes those mechanisms sufficiently precise to generate testable hypotheses about domains beyond the models. Evidence beyond MI is ultimately required to establish what model mechanisms reveal about the world.