Internal Route of Recruitment

Determine whether recruitment of downstream counterweights is mediated by re-expression through changed detector coefficients or by re-routing through downstream components.

Background

The paper distinguishes genuine recruitment from a final-normalization artifact and concludes that the observed sign changes and dose-dependent effects cannot be explained by renormalization alone. However, the causal interventions establish only that downstream directions become more important in the dosed world; they do not identify the internal computational route producing that dependence.

Two candidate explanations are stated explicitly: detectors may compute different coefficients because their inputs change, or the effect may be re-routed through downstream components. The authors leave this mechanistic decomposition unresolved.

References

It remains open whether recruitment is carried by re-expression, the detectors computing different coefficients because their inputs have changed, or by re-routing through downstream components. This concerns the internal route of an effect whose existence and magnitude are already fixed. Both are the model computing, neither is an artifact of measurement, and the choice between them does not bear on whether the reserve is real. We leave the decomposition to future work, noting that emergent self-repair was likewise established causally before any instance of it received an end-to-end account.

— Every Ablation Is a Dose: Counterweights and the Semblance of Self-Repair  (2610.02173 - Ahmad et al., 1 Oct 2026) in Appendix, Section “Recruitment Is Not Renormalization,” subsection “What this establishes, and what it leaves open”

Wherever (a)~the intervened coordinate carries a class-differential signal, (b)~the checkpoint contains downstream directions with standing negative gain on it, and (c)~the readout is per-class or class-pooled, a constant-clamp ablation records a rise in those directions that is monotone in $|\gamma_r|$, and the rise is reported as compensation.

— Every Ablation Is a Dose: Counterweights and the Semblance of Self-Repair  (2610.02173 - Ahmad et al., 1 Oct 2026) in Appendix, Section “A Conjecture That Every Design Is a Point in the (u,v) Plane,” paragraph “Conjecture”