Learn Interpretability: Distill Circuits

A bilingual, Colab-first repository for working through the entire Distill 2020 Circuits thread with strict live-only notebooks.

This repository now does one thing only:

• map the Distill Circuits thread into a single D00-D09 sequence
• keep mirrored English and Chinese notes
• generate live notebooks for D01-D09
• refuse pre-rendered figures/, precomputed artifacts/, and slideshow-style walkthroughs

Start Here

• Read the thread entry: D00 Thread: Circuits
• Open the first live notebook: D01 in Colab
• Browse the docs index: docs/en/index.md

Why This Repo Exists

The Distill Circuits thread is still one of the clearest public introductions to neural circuits. The problem is that many readers meet it as a sequence of beautiful static pages. This repository rebuilds the thread as a runnable study path: each live notebook has to earn its claims with public weights, public data, and runtime-generated analysis.

Distill Sequence

ID	Article	Paper	Mode	Docs	Colab
D00	Thread: Circuits	Thread: Circuits	reading-only	D00	-
D01	Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits	Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits	live	D01	Colab
D02	An Overview of Early Vision in InceptionV1	An Overview of Early Vision in InceptionV1	live	D02	Colab
D03	Curve Detectors	Curve Detectors	live	D03	Colab
D04	Naturally Occurring Equivariance in Neural Networks	Naturally Occurring Equivariance in Neural Networks	live	D04	Colab
D05	High-Low Frequency Detectors	High-Low Frequency Detectors	live	D05	Colab
D06	Curve Circuits	Curve Circuits	live	D06	Colab
D07	Visualizing Weights	Visualizing Weights	live	D07	Colab
D08	Branch Specialization	Branch Specialization	live	D08	Colab
D09	Weight Banding	Weight Banding	live	D09	Colab

Repo Shape

• content/course.json: the single source of truth for D00-D09
• docs/en and docs/zh: mirrored article notes and navigation pages
• notebooks/en and notebooks/zh: mirrored live notebooks for D01-D09
• utils/distill_circuits.py: shared runtime helpers for InceptionV1, stimuli, searches, and weight analysis
• scripts/: notebook generation, README/docs rendering, validation, link checks, audit, and smoke tests

Regenerate And Verify

python3 scripts/render_readmes.py
python3 scripts/generate_course_notebooks.py
python3 scripts/validate_course.py
python3 scripts/audit_realtime_policy.py
python3 scripts/check_links.py
python3 scripts/smoke_notebooks.py