26 citations · 44 across the 23 of their papers we have counts for
15 papers · 1 filter
Forking Fast: Efficiently Estimating Uncertainty Dynamics in Text Generation
Eric Bigelow, Amir Zur, Satchel Grant +7
LLM reasoning is stochastic, and so understanding a model requires grappling with the distribution of reasoning chains that it might produce for a given question, i.e., its uncerta…
Stories in Space: In-Context Learning Trajectories in Conceptual Belief Space
Eric Bigelow, Raphaël Sarfati, Daniel Wurgaft +5
Large Language Models (LLMs) update their behavior in context, which can be viewed as a form of Bayesian inference. However, the structure of the latent hypothesis space over which…
Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought
Siddharth Boppana, Annabel Ma, Max Loeffler +5
We provide evidence of performative chain-of-thought (CoT) in reasoning models, where a model becomes strongly confident in its final answer, but continues generating tokens withou…
The Shape of Beliefs: Geometry, Dynamics, and Interventions along Representation Manifolds of Language Models' Posteriors
Raphaël Sarfati, Eric Bigelow, Daniel Wurgaft +6
Large language models (LLMs) form implicit beliefs (posteriors over latent variables) from prompts, but we lack a mechanistic account of how these beliefs are encoded in representa…
From Memorization to Reasoning in the Spectrum of Loss Curvature
Jack Merullo, Srihita Vatsavaya, Lucius Bushnaq +1
We characterize how memorization is represented in transformer models and show that it can be disentangled in the weights of both language models (LMs) and vision transformers (ViT…
Transferring Linear Features Across Language Models With Model Stitching
Alan Chen, Jack Merullo, Alessandro Stolfo +1
In this work, we demonstrate that affine mappings between residual streams of language models is a cheap way to effectively transfer represented features between models. We apply t…
On Linear Representations and Pretraining Data Frequency in Language Models
Jack Merullo, Noah A. Smith, Sarah Wiegreffe +1
Pretraining data has a direct impact on the behaviors and quality of language models (LMs), but we only understand the most basic principles of this relationship. While most work f…
$100K or 100 Days: Trade-offs when Pre-Training with Academic Resources
Apoorv Khandelwal, Tian Yun, Nihal V. Nayak +4
Pre-training is notoriously compute-intensive and academic researchers are notoriously under-resourced. It is, therefore, commonly assumed that academics can't pre-train models. In…
Talking Heads: Understanding Inter-layer Communication in Transformer Language Models
Jack Merullo, Carsten Eickhoff, Ellie Pavlick
Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and route…
Dual Process Learning: Controlling Use of In-Context vs. In-Weights Strategies with Weight Forgetting
Suraj Anand, Michael A. Lepori, Jack Merullo +1
Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL…
Characterizing Mechanisms for Factual Recall in Language Models
Qinan Yu, Jack Merullo, Ellie Pavlick
Language Models (LMs) often must integrate facts they memorized in pretraining with new information that appears in a given context. These two sources can disagree, causing competi…
Circuit Component Reuse Across Tasks in Transformer Language Models
Jack Merullo, Carsten Eickhoff, Ellie Pavlick
Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has shown that behaviors in language models can be successfully reverse-engineered through circuit analysis. A common criticism, however…
Language Models Implement Simple Word2Vec-style Vector Arithmetic
Jack Merullo, Carsten Eickhoff, Ellie Pavlick
A primary criticism towards language models (LMs) is their inscrutability. This paper presents evidence that, despite their size and complexity, LMs sometimes exploit a simple vect…
Linearly Mapping from Image to Text Space
Jack Merullo, Louis Castricato, Carsten Eickhoff +1
The extent to which text-only language models (LMs) learn to represent features of the non-linguistic world is an open question. Prior work has shown that pretrained LMs can be tau…
Pretraining on Interactions for Learning Grounded Affordance Representations
Jack Merullo, Dylan Ebert, Carsten Eickhoff +1
Lexical semantics and cognitive science point to affordances (i.e. the actions that objects support) as critical for understanding and representing nouns and verbs. However, study…