Related papers: An Interpretability Illusion for BERT
Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse engineer neural networks by uncovering which high-level algorithms they implement. Causal abstraction provides a precise notion of when a network implements an algorithm, i.e., a causal model of…
Pretrained deep contextual representations have advanced the state-of-the-art on various commonsense NLP tasks, but we lack a concrete understanding of the capability of these models. Thus, we investigate and challenge several aspects of…
Reading comprehension models have been successfully applied to extractive text answers, but it is unclear how best to generalize these models to abstractive numerical answers. We enable a BERT-based reading comprehension model to perform…
The attention layer in a neural network model provides insights into the model's reasoning behind its prediction, which are usually criticized for being opaque. Recently, seemingly contradictory viewpoints have emerged about the…
Single neurons in neural networks are often interpretable in that they represent individual, intuitively meaningful features. However, many neurons exhibit $\textit{mixed selectivity}$, i.e., they represent multiple unrelated features. A…
Recent developments in transformer-based language models have allowed them to capture a wide variety of world knowledge that can be adapted to downstream tasks with limited resources. However, what pieces of information are understood in…
Despite substantial efforts, neural network interpretability remains an elusive goal, with previous research failing to provide succinct explanations of most single neurons' impact on the network output. This limitation is due to the…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are highly effective on a variety of graph-related tasks; however, they lack interpretability and transparency. Current explainability approaches are typically local and treat GNNs as black-boxes. They do not…
Models based on large-pretrained language models, such as S(entence)BERT, provide effective and efficient sentence embeddings that show high correlation to human similarity ratings, but lack interpretability. On the other hand, graph…
Interpretability research often adopts a neuron-centric lens, treating individual neurons as the fundamental units of explanation. However, neuron-level explanations can be undermined by superposition, where single units respond to mixtures…
The field of natural language processing has reached breakthroughs with the advent of transformers. They have remained state-of-the-art since then, and there also has been much research in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating the…
Neural networks models for NLP are typically implemented without the explicit encoding of language rules and yet they are able to break one performance record after another. This has generated a lot of research interest in interpreting the…
The interpretability of ML models is important, but it is not clear what it amounts to. So far, most philosophers have discussed the lack of interpretability of black-box models such as neural networks, and methods such as explainable AI…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT are being used for almost all language-related tasks, but interpreting their behavior still remains a significant challenge and many important questions remain largely unanswered. In this work,…
In this paper, we study the response of large models from the BERT family to incoherent inputs that should confuse any model that claims to understand natural language. We define simple heuristics to construct such examples. Our experiments…
Contextualized word embeddings, i.e. vector representations for words in context, are naturally seen as an extension of previous noncontextual distributional semantic models. In this work, we focus on BERT, a deep neural network that…
While large language models like BERT demonstrate strong empirical performance on semantic tasks, whether this reflects true conceptual competence or surface-level statistical association remains unclear. I investigate whether BERT encodes…
An essential goal in mechanistic interpretability to decode a network, i.e., to convert a neural network's raw weights to an interpretable algorithm. Given the difficulty of the decoding problem, progress has been made to understand the…
Most of the recent works on probing representations have focused on BERT, with the presumption that the findings might be similar to the other models. In this work, we extend the probing studies to two other models in the family, namely…
Along with the great success of deep neural networks, there is also growing concern about their black-box nature. The interpretability issue affects people's trust on deep learning systems. It is also related to many ethical problems, e.g.,…