5 papers · 1 filter
Stochastic Parameter Decomposition
Lucius Bushnaq, Dan Braun, Lee Sharkey
A key step in reverse engineering neural networks is to decompose them into simpler parts that can be studied in relative isolation. Linear parameter decomposition -- a framework t…
Interpretability in Parameter Space: Minimizing Mechanistic Description Length with Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition
Dan Braun, Lucius Bushnaq, Stefan Heimersheim +2
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the internal mechanisms learned by neural networks. Despite recent progress toward this goal, it remains unclear how best to decompo…
Identifying Functionally Important Features with End-to-End Sparse Dictionary Learning
Dan Braun, Jordan Taylor, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill +1
Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary t…
The Local Interaction Basis: Identifying Computationally-Relevant and Sparsely Interacting Features in Neural Networks
Lucius Bushnaq, Stefan Heimersheim, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill +7
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand the behavior of neural networks by reverse-engineering their internal computations. However, current methods struggle to find clear…
Using Degeneracy in the Loss Landscape for Mechanistic Interpretability
Lucius Bushnaq, Jake Mendel, Stefan Heimersheim +5
Mechanistic Interpretability aims to reverse engineer the algorithms implemented by neural networks by studying their weights and activations. An obstacle to reverse engineering ne…