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Tackling Polysemanticity with Neuron Embeddings

Machine Learning 2024-11-14 v1

Abstract

We present neuron embeddings, a representation that can be used to tackle polysemanticity by identifying the distinct semantic behaviours in a neuron's characteristic dataset examples, making downstream manual or automatic interpretation much easier. We apply our method to GPT2-small, and provide a UI for exploring the results. Neuron embeddings are computed using a model's internal representations and weights, making them domain and architecture agnostic and removing the risk of introducing external structure which may not reflect a model's actual computation. We describe how neuron embeddings can be used to measure neuron polysemanticity, which could be applied to better evaluate the efficacy of Sparse Auto-Encoders (SAEs).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.08166,
  title  = {Tackling Polysemanticity with Neuron Embeddings},
  author = {Alex Foote},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.08166},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:57:41.455Z