Complexity-Theoretic Limits on the Promises of Artificial Neural Network Reverse-Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emerging folklore in the cognitive sciences suggests that interpretability techniques to reverse-engineer artificial neural networks (ANNs) could speed up discovery and theory-building. For many researchers in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI), the full observability and perturbability of ANNs trained on complex tasks affords a shortcut to domain insights, cognitive theories, neurocognitive models, application improvement, and user safety. Folklore intuitions, however, are typically disconnected from other relevant knowledge. Here we examine these intuitions formally by drawing relevant connections to computational complexity theory. We model interpretability queries computationally and analyze their resource demands for biological/artificial high-level cognition. We prove mathematically that, contrary to folklore, basic circuit-finding queries in classic ANNs are already infeasibly demanding to answer even approximately. We discuss how interdisciplinary integration can mitigate this disconnect and situate the broader implications for the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of AI-fueled discovery, and AI ethics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".