Related papers: Circuit Compositions: Exploring Modular Structures…
Understanding neural networks is challenging in part because of the dense, continuous nature of their hidden states. We explore whether we can train neural networks to have hidden states that are sparse, discrete, and more interpretable by…
The increasing use of complex machine learning models in education has led to concerns about their interpretability, which in turn has spurred interest in developing explainability techniques that are both faithful to the model's inner…
The Transformer model has a tendency to overfit various aspects of the training data, such as the overall sequence length. We study elementary string edit functions using a defined set of error indicators to interpret the behaviour of the…
A central idea in understanding brains and building artificial intelligence is that structure determines function. Yet, how the brain's complex structure arises from a limited set of genetic instructions remains a key question. The ultra…
Humans excel at applying learned behavior to unlearned situations. A crucial component of this generalization behavior is our ability to compose/decompose a whole into reusable parts, an attribute known as compositionality. One of the…
Do transformers, when trained on sequential reasoning traces, build internal models of the underlying task? And if so, does the structure of those internal representations mirror the structure of the domain? We train an 8-layer transformer…
One major challenge of neuroscience is finding interesting structures in a seemingly disorganized neural activity. Often these structures have computational implications that help to understand the functional role of a particular brain…
Mechanistic interpretability identifies internal circuits responsible for model behaviors, yet translating these findings into human-understandable explanations remains an open problem. We present a pipeline that bridges circuit-level…
We present a methodology that explores how sentence structure is reflected in neural representations of machine translation systems. We demonstrate our model-agnostic approach with the Transformer English-German translation model. We…
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…
Tensor networks and circuits are widely used data structures to represent pseudo-Boolean functions. These two formalisms have been studied primarily in separate communities, and this paper aims to establish equivalences between them. We…
Cross-lingual word embeddings encode the meaning of words from different languages into a shared low-dimensional space. An important requirement for many downstream tasks is that word similarity should be independent of language - i.e.,…
Circuits based on sum-product structure have become a ubiquitous representation to compactly encode knowledge, from Boolean functions to probability distributions. By imposing constraints on the structure of such circuits, certain inference…
Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…
Conditional computation and modular networks have been recently proposed for multitask learning and other problems as a way to decompose problem solving into multiple reusable computational blocks. We propose a new approach for learning…
Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…
The current understanding of deep neural networks can only partially explain how input structure, network parameters and optimization algorithms jointly contribute to achieve the strong generalization power that is typically observed in…
In [4], the authors present the DisCoCirc (Distributed Compositional Circuits) formalism for the English language, a grammar-based framework derived from the production rules that incorporates circuit-like representations in order to give a…
Computation is classically studied in terms of automata, formal languages and algorithms; yet, the relation between neural dynamics and symbolic representations and operations is still unclear in traditional eliminative connectionism.…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand neural networks by identifying which learned features mediate specific behaviors. Attribution graphs reveal these feature pathways, but interpreting them requires extensive manual analysis --…