Beyond Accuracy: Introducing a Symbolic-Mechanistic Approach to Interpretable Evaluation
Researchers propose a new symbolic-mechanistic approach to evaluate AI models that goes beyond accuracy metrics to detect whether models truly generalize or rely on shortcuts like memorization. Their method combines symbolic rules with mechanistic interpretability to reveal when models exploit patterns rather than learn genuine capabilities, demonstrated through NL-to-SQL tasks where a memorization model achieved 94% accuracy but failed true generalization tests.