Mathematical Circuits in Neural Networks

post by Sean Osier · 2022-09-22T03:48:21.154Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

This is a link post for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGQN0TVCtMo

Contents

  Summary
  Motivation
    Features / Circuits:
    Universality:
  Results
    Minimum Network:
  Full Details
None
5 comments

(Also posted on the EA Forum [EA · GW])

This is one of my final projects for the Columbia EA Summer 2022 Project Based AI Safety Reading Group (special thanks to facilitators Rohan Subramini and Gabe Mukobi). If you're curious you can find my other project here [EA · GW].

Summary

In this project, I:

  1.  Derive by hand the optimal configurations (architecture and weights) of "vanilla" neural networks (multilayer perceptrons; ReLU activations) that implement basic mathematical functions (e.g. absolute value, minimum of two numbers, etc.)
  2. Identify "features" and "circuits" of these networks that are reused repeatedly across networks modeling different mathematical functions
  3. Verify these theoretical results empirically (in code)

What follows is a brief introduction to this work. For full details, please see:

Motivation

Olah et al. make three claims about the fundamental interpretability of neural networks:

They demonstrate these claims in the context of image models:

Features / Circuits:

Universality:

This work demonstrates the same concepts apply in the space of neural networks modeling basic mathematical functions.

Results

Specifically, I show that the optimal network for calculating the minimum of two arbitrary numbers is fully constructed from smaller "features" and "circuits" used across even simpler mathematical functions. Along the way, I explore:

Minimum Network:

I also demonstrate that each of these theoretical results hold in practice. The code for these experiments can be found on the GitHub page for this project.

Full Details

For full details, please see the PDF presentation in the GitHub repo or watch the full video walkthrough:

4 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2022-09-22T05:21:51.789Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

representation theory is a related topic - representing other math using linear algebra. see, eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPx5sW6Bl-M - the wikipedia page is also an okay intro.

Replies from: Sean Osier
comment by Sean Osier · 2022-09-23T00:05:37.123Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Interesting, I'll definitely look into that! Sounds quite related.

comment by Algon · 2022-09-22T11:19:52.147Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For the identity function, wouldn't regularisation would push the non-zero weights towards unity? 

Replies from: Sean Osier
comment by Sean Osier · 2022-09-23T00:11:53.417Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for the comment! I didn't get around to testing that, but that's one of the exact things I had in mind for my "Next Steps" #3 on training regimens that more reliably produce optimal, interpretable models.