Related papers: Sparse Attention Decomposition Applied to Circuit …
Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has shown that behaviors in language models can be successfully reverse-engineered through circuit analysis. A common criticism, however, is that each circuit is task-specific, and thus such…
This paper introduces an efficient and robust method for discovering interpretable circuits in large language models using discrete sparse autoencoders. Our approach addresses key limitations of existing techniques, namely computational…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse-engineer large language models (LLMs) into human-understandable computational circuits. However, the complexity of pretrained models often obscures the minimal mechanisms required for specific…
Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…
The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…
We introduce methods for discovering and applying sparse feature circuits. These are causally implicated subnetworks of human-interpretable features for explaining language model behaviors. Circuits identified in prior work consist of…
Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of machine learning models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated…
Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…
We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…
Emerging from the pairwise attention in conventional Transformers, there is a growing interest in sparse attention mechanisms that align more closely with localized, contextual learning in the biological brain. Existing studies such as the…
Multi-task semantic communication can serve multiple learning tasks using a shared encoder model. Existing models have overlooked the intricate relationships between features extracted during an encoding process of tasks. This paper…
We report a small, reproducible audit of which sparse-autoencoder (SAE) features of GPT-2 small fire differently on failed versus successful trials of the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. On 300 prompts, GPT-2 small reaches 79.7%…
Without densely tiled anchor boxes or grid points in the image, sparse R-CNN achieves promising results through a set of object queries and proposal boxes updated in the cascaded training manner. However, due to the sparse nature and the…
Understanding the internal circuits that language models use to solve tasks remains a central challenge in mechanistic interpretability. A crucial part of finding circuits is understanding why each attention head attends where it does. To…
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…
The inference process for large language models is slow and memory-intensive, with one of the most critical bottlenecks being excessive Key-Value (KV) cache accesses. This paper introduces "Double Sparsity," a novel post-training sparse…
Vision transformer (ViT) expands the success of transformer models from sequential data to images. The model decomposes an image into many smaller patches and arranges them into a sequence. Multi-head self-attentions are then applied to the…
We propose an efficient interactive method for multi-head self-attention via decomposition. For existing methods using multi-head self-attention, the attention operation of each head is computed independently. However, we show that the…
Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…
We present an in-depth mechanistic interpretability analysis of training small transformers on an elementary task, counting, which is a crucial deductive step in many algorithms. In particular, we investigate the collaboration/competition…