Yesterday Adam Shai put up a cool post which… well, take a look at the visual:

Yup, it sure looks like that fractal is very noisily embedded in the residual activations of a neural net trained on a toy problem. Linearly embedded, no less.

I (John) initially misunderstood what was going on in that post, but some back-and-forth with Adam convinced me that it really is as cool as that visual makes it look, and arguably even cooler. So David and I wrote up this post / some code, partly as an explainer for why on earth that fractal would show up, and partly as an explainer for the possibilities this work potentially opens up for interpretability.

One sentence summary: when tracking the hidden state of a hidden Markov model, a Bayesian’s beliefs follow a chaos game (with the observations randomly selecting the update at each time), so the set of such beliefs naturally forms a fractal structure. By the end of the post, hopefully that will all sound straightforward and simple.

Background: Fractals and Symmetry

Let’s start with the famous Sierpinski Triangle:

Looks qualitatively a lot like Shai’s theoretically-predicted fractal, right? That’s not a coincidence; we’ll see that the two fractals can be generated by very similar mechanisms.

The key defining feature of the Sierpinski triangle is that it consists of three copies of itself, each shrunken and moved to a particular spot:

Mathematically: we can think of the Sierpinski triangle as a set of points in two dimensions (i.e. the blue points in the image). Call that set . Then “the Sierpinski triangle consists of three copies of itself, each shrunken and moved to a particular spot” can be written algebraically as

$S = f_{1} (S) \cup f_{2} (S) \cup f_{3} (S)$

where $f_{1}, f_{2}, f_{3}$ are the three functions which “shrink and position” the three copies. (Conveniently, they are affine functions, i.e. linear transformations for the shrinking plus a constant vector for the positioning.)

That equation, $S = f_{1} (S) \cup f_{2} (S) \cup f_{3} (S)$ , expresses the set of points in the Sierpinski triangle as a function of that same set - in other words, the Sierpinski triangle is a fixed point of that equation. That suggests a way to (approximately) compute the triangle: to find a fixed point of a function, start with some ~arbitrary input, then apply the function over and over again. And indeed, we can use that technique to generate the Sierpinski triangle.

Here’s one standard visual way to generate the triangle:

Notice that this is a special case of repeatedly applying $S \leftarrow f_{1} (S) \cup f_{2} (S) \cup f_{3} (S)$ ! We start with the set of all the points in the initial triangle, then at each step we make three copies, shrink and position them according to the three functions, take the union of the copies, and then pass that set onwards to the next iteration.

… but we don’t need to start with a triangle. As is typically the case when finding a fixed point via iteration, the initial set can be pretty arbitrary. For instance, we could just as easily start with a square:

… or even just some random points. They’ll all converge to the same triangle.

Point is: it’s mainly the symmetry relationship $S = f_{1} (S) \cup f_{2} (S) \cup f_{3} (S)$ which specifies the Sierpinski triangle. Other symmetries typically generate other fractals; for instance, this one generates a fern-like shape:

Once we know the symmetry, we can generate the fractal by iterating from some ~arbitrary starting point.

Background: Chaos Games

There’s one big problem with computationally generating fractals via the iterative approach in the previous section: the number of points explodes exponentially. For the Sierpinski triangle, we need to make three copies each iteration, so after n timesteps we’ll be tracking 3^n times as many points as we started with.

Here’s one simple way around the exponential explosion problem.

First, imagine that we just want to randomly sample one point in the fractal, rather than drawing the whole thing. Well, at each timestep, when we make three copies, we could just randomly pick one of those copies to actually keep track of and forget about the rest. Or, equivalently: at each timestep, randomly pick one of the three functions to apply. For maximum computational simplicity, we can start with just a single random point, so at each timestep we just randomly pick one of the three functions and apply it once.

Init: random point x in 2D
Loop:
	f <- randomly select one of (f1, f2, f3)
	x <- f(x)

Conceptually, we could then sketch out the whole fractal by repeating this process to randomly sample a bunch of points. But it turns out we don’t even need to do that! If we just run the single-point process for a while, each iteration randomly picking one of the three functions to apply, then we’ll “wander around” the fractal, in some sense, and in the long run (pretty fast in practice) we’ll wander around the whole thing. So we can actually just run the process for a while, and keep a record of all the points along the way (after some relatively-short warmup period), and that will produce the fractal.

That algorithm is called a “chaos game”. Here’s what it looks like for the Sierpinski triangle:

You can hopefully see the appeal of the method from a programmer’s perspective: it’s very simple to code (the most complicated part was outputting a video), it’s fast, and the visuals are great.

Bayesian Belief States For A Hidden Markov Model

Shai’s post uses a net trained to predict a particular hidden Markov process, so let’s walk through that model.

The causal structure of a hidden Markov process is always:

$H^{t}$ is the “hidden” state at time $t$ , and $O^{t}$ is the “observation” at time $t$ .

For the specific system used in Shai’s post, there are three possible hidden states: $h_{A}$ , $h_{B}$ , and $h_{C}$ . (Shai’s post called them $H_{0}$ , $H_{1}$ , and $H_{2}$ , but we’re using slightly different notation which we hope will be clearer.) The observations in this specific system can be thought of as noisy measurements of the state - e.g. if the hidden state is $h_{A}$ , then 90% the observation will be A, and 5% each for the other two possibilities.

Zoom in!
(Thank you to Shai for providing the right parameters for this one.)

Now, imagine a Bayesian agent who sees the observation at each timestep, and tries to keep a running best guess of the hidden state of the system. What does that agent’s update-process look like?

Well, the agent is generally trying to track $P [H^{t} | O^{< t}]$ . Each timestep, it needs to update in two ways. First, there’s a Bayes update on the observation:

$P [H^{t} | O^{< t}] \to P [H^{t} | O^{\leq t}] = \frac{1}{Z} P [O^{t} | H^{t}] P [H^{t} | O^{< t}]$

where $P [O^{t} | H^{t}]$ are the prespecified observation-probabilities for each state and $Z$ is a normalizer. Second, since time advances, the agent “updates” to track $H^{t + 1}$ rather than $H^{t}$ :

$P [H^{t + 1} | O^{\leq t}] = \sum_{H^{t}} P [H^{t + 1} | H^{t}] P [H^{t} | O^{\leq t}]$

where $P [H^{t + 1} | H^{t}]$ is the prespecified transition matrix.

If we squint a bit at these two update rules, we can view them as:

At each timestep, the agent has some distribution over the current hidden state
When time advances, some observation is randomly received from the system, and then the agent’s distribution is transformed to a new distribution (with the transformation function chosen by the observation).

… so if we forget all the notation about probabilities and just call the agent’s distribution at a specific time $x$ , then the update looks like

$x \leftarrow f_{O} (x)$

We have a set of 3 functions (one for each observation), and at each timestep the (random) observation picks out one function to actually apply to $x$ . Sound familiar?

It’s a chaos game.

So if we run this chaos game (i.e. have our Bayesian agent update each timestep on observations from the hidden Markov process), and keep track of the points it visits (i.e. each distribution over hidden states) after some warmup time, what fractal will it trace out?

That’s the fractal from Shai’s post:

You can visually compare this to the “theoretical prediction” from Shai’s post.

Key points to take away:

The “set of points” which forms this fractal is the set of distributions which a Bayesian agent tracking the hidden state of the process will assign over time (after a relatively-short warmup).
That Bayesian agent quite literally implements a chaos game, with the observation at each time choosing which function to apply.
The “symmetry” functions come from the updates performed by the agent.

In full mathematical glory, the pieces are:

State $x (t) := (h \mapsto P [H^{t} = h | O^{< t}])$
Update $f_{O} (x) := (h^{'} \mapsto \sum_{h} P [H^{t + 1} = h^{'} | H^{t} = h] \frac{1}{Z} P [O^{t} | H^{t} = h] x_{h})$

Why Would That Show Up In A Neural Net?

Part of what this all illustrates is that the fractal shape is kinda… baked into any Bayesian-ish system tracking the hidden state of the Markov model. So in some sense, it’s not very surprising to find it linearly embedded in activations of a residual stream; all that really means is that the probabilities for each hidden state are linearly represented in the residual stream. The “surprising” fact is really that the probabilities have this fractal structure, not that they’re embedded in the residual stream.

… but I think that undersells the potential of this kind of thing for interpretability.

Why This Sort Of Thing Might Be A Pretty Big Deal

The key thing to notice is that the hidden states of a hidden Markov process are hidden to the agent trying to track them. They are, in probabilistic modeling jargon, latent variables.

According to us, the main “hard part” of interpretability is to not just back out what algorithms a net embeds or computations it performs, but what stuff-in-the-external-world the net’s internal signals represent. In a pure Bayesian frame: what latent (relative to the sensory inputs) structures/concepts does the system model its environment as containing?

What the result in Shai’s post suggests is that, for some broad classes of models, when the system models-the-world as containing some latent variables (i.e. the hidden states, in this case), the system will internally compute distributions over those latent variables, and those distributions will form a self-similar (typically fractal) set.

With that in mind, the real hot possibility is the inverse of what Shai and his coresearchers did. Rather than start with a toy model with some known nice latents, start with a net trained on real-world data, and go look for self-similar sets of activations in order to figure out what latent variables the net models its environment as containing. The symmetries of the set would tell us something about how the net updates its distributions over latents in response to inputs and time passing, which in turn would inform how the net models the latents as relating to its inputs, which in turn would inform which real-world structures those latents represent.

The theory-practice gap here looks substantial. Even on this toy model, the fractal embedded in the net is clearly very very noisy, which would make it hard to detect the self-similarity de novo. And in real-world nets, everything would be far higher dimensional, and have a bunch of higher-level structure in it (not just a simple three-state hidden Markov model). Nonetheless, this is the sort of problem where finding a starting point which could solve the problem even in principle is quite difficult, so this one is potentially a big deal.

Thank you to Adam Shai for helping John through his confusion.