Posts

Evolutionary prompt optimization for SAE feature visualization 2024-11-14T13:06:49.728Z
SAE features for refusal and sycophancy steering vectors 2024-10-12T14:54:48.022Z
Extracting SAE task features for in-context learning 2024-08-12T20:34:13.747Z
Self-explaining SAE features 2024-08-05T22:20:36.041Z

Comments

Comment by neverix on SAE features for refusal and sycophancy steering vectors · 2024-10-16T17:48:17.334Z · LW · GW
  1. It doesn't really make sense to interpret feature activation values as log probabilities. If we did, we'd have to worry about scaling. It's also not guaranteed the score wouldn't just decrease because of decreased accuracy on correct answers.
  2. Phi seems specialized for MMLU-like problems and has an outsized score for a model its size, I would be surprised if it's biased because of the format of the question. However, it's possible using answers instead of letters would help improve raw accuracy in this case because the feature we used (45142) seems to max-activate on plain text and not multiple choice answers and it's somewhat surprising it does this well on multiple-choice questions. For this reason, I think using text answers will boost the feature's score but won't change the relative ranking of features by accuracy. I don't know how to adapt your proposed experiment for the task of finding how accurate a feature is at eliciting the model's knowledge of correct answers.
  3. This is a technical detail. We use a jax.lax.scan by the layer index and store layers in one structure with a special named axis. This mainly improves compilation time. Penzai has since implemented the technique in the main library.
Comment by neverix on Self-explaining SAE features · 2024-09-08T17:00:35.132Z · LW · GW
  • We use our own judgement as a (potentially very inaccurate) proxy for accuracy as an explanation and let readers look on their own at the feature dashboard interface. We judge using a random sample of examples at different levels of activation. We had an automatic interpretation scoring pipeline that used Llama 3 70B, but we did not use it because (IIRC) it was too slow to run with multiple explanations per feature. Perhaps it is now practical to use a method like this.
  • That is a pattern that happens frequently, but we're not confident enough to propose any particular form. It is sometimes thrown off by random spikes, self-similarity gradually rising at larger scales, or entropy peaking in the beginning. Because of this, there is still a lot of room for improvement in cases where a human (or maybe a peak-finding algorithm) could do better than our linear metric.
Comment by neverix on You should go to ML conferences · 2024-08-11T19:25:43.756Z · LW · GW

How is that paper alignment-relevant?

Comment by neverix on Research Report: Alternative sparsity methods for sparse autoencoders with OthelloGPT. · 2024-06-15T03:12:54.608Z · LW · GW

Freshman’s dream sparsity loss

A similar regularizer is known as Hoyer-Square.

Pick a value for  and a small .  Then define the activation function  in the following way.  Given a vector , let  be the value of the th-largest entry in .  Then define the vector  by 

Is  in the following formula a typo?

Comment by neverix on 200 COP in MI: Exploring Polysemanticity and Superposition · 2023-11-23T22:34:42.504Z · LW · GW

To clarify, I thought it was about superposition happening inside the projection afterwards.

Comment by neverix on 200 COP in MI: Exploring Polysemanticity and Superposition · 2023-11-21T22:30:07.622Z · LW · GW

This happens in transformer MLP layers. Note that the hidden dimen

Is the point that transformer MLPs blow up the hidden dimension in the middle?

Comment by neverix on Steering GPT-2-XL by adding an activation vector · 2023-08-31T19:41:45.791Z · LW · GW

Activation additions in generative models

 

Also related is https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10960. They use a small neural network to generate steering vectors for the UNet bottleneck in diffusion to edit images using CLIP.

Comment by neverix on The Low-Hanging Fruit Prior and sloped valleys in the loss landscape · 2023-08-24T18:18:40.530Z · LW · GW

From a conversation on Discord:

Do you have in mind a way to weigh sequential learning into the actual prior?

Dmitry:

good question! We haven't thought about an explicit complexity measure that would give this prior, but a very loose approximation that we've been keeping in the back of our minds could be a Turing machine/Boolean circuit version of the "BIMT" weight penalty from this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08746 (which they show encourages modularity at least in toy models)

Response:

Hmm, BIMT seems to only be about intra-layer locality. It would certainly encourage learning an ensemble of features, but I'm not sure if it would capture the interesting bit, which I think is the fact that features are built up sequentially from earlier to later layers and changes are only accepted if they improve local loss.

I'm thinking about something like an existence of a relatively smooth scaling law (?) as the criterion.

So, just some smoothness constraint that would basically integrate over paths SGD could take.

Comment by neverix on Inference from a Mathematical Description of an Existing Alignment Research: a proposal for an outer alignment research program · 2023-08-02T13:26:52.083Z · LW · GW

We can idealize the outer alignment solution as a logical inductor.

Why outer?

Comment by neverix on The "spelling miracle": GPT-3 spelling abilities and glitch tokens revisited · 2023-08-01T08:20:39.110Z · LW · GW

You could literally go through some giant corpus with an LLM and see which samples have gradients similar to those from training on a spelling task.

Comment by neverix on Hessian and Basin volume · 2023-06-06T15:56:52.579Z · LW · GW

There are also somewhat principled reasons for using a "fuzzy ellipsoid", which I won't explain here.

If you view  as 2x learning rate, the ellipsoid contains parameters which will jump straight into the basin under the quadratic approximation, and we assume for points outside the basin the approximation breaks entirely. If you account for gradient noise in the form of a Gaussian with sigma equal to gradient, the PDF of the resulting point at the basin is equal to the probability a Gaussian parametrized by the ellipsoid at the preceding point. This is wrong, but there is an interpretation of the noise as a Gaussian with variance increasing away from the basin origin.

Comment by neverix on Power-seeking can be probable and predictive for trained agents · 2023-04-20T15:50:14.875Z · LW · GW

Seems like quoting doesn't work for LaTeX, it was definitions 2/3. Reading again I saw D2 was indeed applicable to sets.

Comment by neverix on Power-seeking can be probable and predictive for trained agents · 2023-04-19T20:42:10.366Z · LW · GW

A0>A1

How is orbit comparison for sets defined?

Comment by neverix on The Credit Assignment Problem · 2023-02-23T13:39:31.171Z · LW · GW

course

coarse?

Comment by neverix on Is there a ML agent that abandons it's utility function out-of-distribution without losing capabilities? · 2023-02-22T17:04:19.353Z · LW · GW

This is the whole point of goal misgeneralization. They have experiments (albeit on toy environments that can be explained by the network finding the wrong algorithm), so I'd say quite plausible.

Comment by neverix on A note about differential technological development · 2023-02-20T10:26:44.776Z · LW · GW

sidereal

typo?

Comment by neverix on Is InstructGPT Following Instructions in Other Languages Surprising? · 2023-02-14T18:46:40.758Z · LW · GW

Is RLHF updating abstract circuits an established fact? Why would it suffer from mode collapse in that case?

Comment by neverix on SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation) · 2023-02-06T15:57:13.892Z · LW · GW

It is based on this. I changed it to optimize using softmax instead of straight-through estimation and added regularization for the embedded tokens.

Notebook link - this is a version that mimics this post instead of optimizing a single neuron as in the original.

EDIT: github link

Comment by neverix on SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation) · 2023-02-05T19:31:43.296Z · LW · GW

This project tried this.

Comment by neverix on SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation) · 2023-02-05T19:26:08.411Z · LW · GW

I did some similar experiments two months ago, and with to your setup the special tokens show up on the first attempt:

Comment by neverix on Thoughts on the impact of RLHF research · 2023-01-26T07:51:25.617Z · LW · GW

techn ical

typo?

Comment by neverix on A History of Bayes' Theorem · 2022-10-30T12:50:03.073Z · LW · GW

Our of curiosity

typo

Comment by neverix on What's the difference between newer Atari-playing AI and the older Deepmind one (from 2014)? · 2021-11-04T12:15:33.581Z · LW · GW

s/EfficientNet/EfficientZero?