Related papers: Circuit Breaking: Removing Model Behaviors with Ta…
Language models, while capable of generating remarkably coherent and seemingly accurate text, can occasionally produce undesirable content, including harmful or toxic outputs. In this paper, we present a new two-stage approach to detect and…
Training a language model to be both helpful and harmless requires careful calibration of refusal behaviours: Models should refuse to follow malicious instructions or give harmful advice (e.g."how do I kill someone?"), but they should not…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret and control, limiting our ability to diagnose and correct undesirable behaviors. Mechanistic…
Neural network models have achieved high performance on a wide variety of complex tasks, but the algorithms that they implement are notoriously difficult to interpret. It is often necessary to hypothesize intermediate variables involved in…
Mechanistic interpretability has identified small sets of attention heads that implement specific behaviours in transformer language models, but recovering these circuits typically requires a bespoke analytical pipeline for each new task.…
Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. The fast-paced evolution of generative language models such as GPT-4 has demonstrated outstanding results in various NLP generation tasks. However,…
Language models often exhibit undesirable behavior, e.g., generating toxic or gender-biased text. In the case of neural language models, an encoding of the undesirable behavior is often present in the model's representations. Thus, one…
The path to interpreting a language model often proceeds via analysis of circuits -- sparse computational subgraphs of the model that capture specific aspects of its behavior. Recent work has automated the task of discovering circuits. Yet,…
Language models (LMs) exhibit and amplify many types of undesirable biases learned from the training data, including gender bias. However, we lack tools for effectively and efficiently changing this behavior without hurting general language…
We study attribute control in language models through the method of Causal Average Treatment Effect (Causal ATE). Existing methods for the attribute control task in Language Models (LMs) check for the co-occurrence of words in a sentence…
Safety-aligned language models systematically refuse harmful requests. While activation steering can modulate refusal, ablating the raw "refusal vector" calculated from contrastive harmful and harmless prompts often causes collateral damage…
Neural language models often fail to generate diverse and informative texts, limiting their applicability in real-world problems. While previous approaches have proposed to address these issues by identifying and penalizing undesirable…
How does language model pretraining help transfer learning? We consider a simple ablation technique for determining the impact of each pretrained layer on transfer task performance. This method, partial reinitialization, involves replacing…
We present a mechanistic analysis of literary style in GPT-2, identifying individual neurons that discriminate between exemplary prose and rigid AI-generated text. Using Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener as a corpus, we extract…
We propose a five-stage methodology for causal feature analysis in transformer language models (probe design, feature extraction, causal validation, robustness testing, and deployment integration) and demonstrate it end-to-end on GPT-2…
Deep generative models are known to produce undesirable samples such as harmful content. Traditional mitigation methods include re-training from scratch, filtering, or editing; however, these are either computationally expensive or can be…
The circuits framework in mechanistic interpretability aims to identify causally important sparse subgraphs of model components, typically evaluated by measuring necessity and sufficiency. We measure circuit reuse, the proportion of…
Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in user-facing applications, yet they still generate undesirable toxic outputs, including profanity, vulgarity, and derogatory remarks. Although numerous detoxification methods exist, most…
Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to refuse harmful instructions through safety fine-tuning. A recent attack, termed abliteration, identifies and suppresses the single latent direction most responsible for refusal behavior,…
Perturbation probing generates task-specific causal hypotheses for FFN neurons in large language models using two forward passes per prompt and no backpropagation, followed by a one-time intervention sweep of about 150 passes amortized…