In a striking neuroscience study, the authors placed a dead salmon in an MRI scanner and showed it images of humans in social situations. Astonishingly, standard analyses of the time reported brain regions \textit{predictive} of social emotions. The explanation, of course, was not supernatural cognition but a cautionary tale about misapplied statistical inference. In AI interpretability, reports of similar ``dead salmon'' artifacts abound: feature attribution, probing, sparse auto-encoding, and even causal analyses can produce plausible-looking explanations for randomly initialized neural networks. Upon inspection of this phenomenon our position is to argue for a pragmatic \textbf{statistical--causal reframing}: explanations of computational systems should be treated as parameters of a (statistical) model, inferred from computational traces. This perspective goes beyond simply measuring statistical variability of explanations due to finite sampling of input data; interpretability methods become statistical estimators, and findings should be tested against explicit and meaningful \textbf{alternative computational hypotheses}, with uncertainty quantified with respect to the postulated statistical model. It also highlights important theoretical issues, such as the identifiability of common interpretability queries, which we argue is critical to understand the field’s susceptibility to false discoveries, poor generalizability, and high variance.

Every neuron in a trained network outputs a number that can be separated into its sign (positive or negative) and its magnitude (absolute size). We call the set of all neuron signs the \textit{sign code}. This raises a key question: does classification depend more on the sign code or on the magnitudes? For overparameterized vision classifiers with sign-preserving activations, the answer is overwhelmingly the sign code. A $k$-nearest neighbor classifier operating only on this binary sign code achieves accuracy comparable to the full model across different architectures, activation functions, and datasets. Moreover, replacing all magnitudes in every layer with random noise while keeping the original signs barely changes residual network performance. In contrast, flipping just 20\% of the signs reduces accuracy to chance. Models generalize well when same-class inputs share similar sign codes. When this overlap is disrupted by a regularizer, training accuracy remains high, but test performance collapses. A margin decomposition helps explain these results: the sign-only contribution to each logit grows as $\sqrt{d}$ in network width, dominating the magnitude residual. The natural unit of analysis for these networks may not be through their continuous weight space but instead through their discrete sign codes.

Recurrent neural networks are widely used in neuroscience and machine learning, but their weight matrices often appear dense and unstructured, defying clean interpretation. The Schur decomposition expresses any recurrent weight matrix in quasi-triangular form, allowing network dynamics to be interpreted as a latent circuit of "functionally feedforward" interactions between orthogonal modes. However, its application for interpreting recurrent weight matrices has been limited due to its well-known combinatorial non-uniqueness. We introduce SchurMO (Schur Manifold Optimization), a method for discovering structured Schur forms via Riemannian gradient descent on the manifold of orthogonal similarity transformations, enabling recovery of target motifs. Compared to a greedy baseline, SchurMO more reliably and more efficiently recovers ground-truth latent motifs (chain-like, banded, and modular structure) from noisy weight matrices. Applying SchurMO to nonlinear recurrent networks enables recovery of latent chain-like structure, providing a link between connectivity and the underlying dynamics of sequence production. Our results highlight SchurMO as a scalable, computationally efficient approach to discovering latent structure in the Schur forms of recurrent weights.

This position paper argues that {\sl fair representations cannot hold what they promise}. Fair representation learning has been a significant trend in research on fairness for machine learning models over the past decade. The main idea of fair representation learning is to provide a data preprocessing mechanism which can facilitate fairness for downstream tasks, and research papers in this area often insinuate a fairness guarantee for all downstream tasks without further qualification. However, provably this cannot be satisfied by any non-degenerate representation. We argue that such over-promising can be harmful in downstream applications and that the responsibility for fairness cannot safely be outsourced to a representation provider in the way current research seems to suggest. As a minimal requirement for a way forward, we suggest that newly proposed fairness representations should be accompanied by compatibility tests that would allow a user to verify whether the representation will actually guarantee fairness for the task at hand.