Subspace Patching: A Conceptual Proposal for Circuit Decomposition in Transformer Residual Streams

We propose Subspace Patching, a conceptual intervention framework for isolating functionally relevant subspaces within Transformer residual streams. The core hypothesis is that task-specific information is stored in linearly separable directions, allowing targeted manipulation without disrupting orthogonal computations. This position paper outlines the theoretical motivation, defines the proposed projection-based intervention at a high level, and discusses potential experimental designs. No empirical results are presented in this version; this serves as a foundational proposal for future implementation and evaluation.