Intepretability
Views my own
My current best guess for why base models refuse so much is that "Sorry, I can't help with that. I don't know how to" is actually extremely common on the internet, based on discussion with Achyuta Rajaram on twitter: https://x.com/ArthurConmy/status/1840514842098106527
This fits with our observations about how frequently LLaMA-1 performs incompetent refusal
> Qwen2 was explicitly trained on synthetic data from Qwen1.5
~~Where is the evidence for this claim? (Claude 3.5 Sonnet could also not find evidence on one rollout)~~
EDITED TO ADD: "these [Qwen] models are utilized to synthesize high-quality pre-training data" is clear evidence, I am being silly.
All other techinques mentioned here (e.g. filtering and adding more IT data at end of training) still sound like models "trained to predict the next word on the internet" (I don't think the training samples being IID early and late in training is an important detail)
Is DM exploring this sort of stuff?
Yes. On the AGI safety and alignment team we are working on activation steering - e.g. Alex Turner who invented the technique with collaborators is working on this, and the first author of a few tokens deep is currently interning on the Gemini Safety team mentioned in this post. We don't have sharp and fast lines between what counts as Gemini Safety and what counts as AGI safety and alignment, but several projects on AGI safety and alignment, and most projects on Gemini Safety would see "safety practices we can test right now" as a research goal.
they [transcoders] take as input the pre-MLP activations, and then aim to represent the post-MLP activations of that MLP sublayer
I assumed this meant activations just before GELU and just after GELU, but looking at code I think I was wrong. Could you rephrase to e.g.
they take as input MLP block inputs (just after LayerNorm) and they output MLP block outputs (what is added to the residual stream)
Ah yeah, Neel's comment makes no claims about feature death beyond Pythia 2.8B residual streams. I trained 524K width Pythia-2.8B MLP SAEs with <5% feature death (not in paper), and Anthropic's work gets to >1M live features (with no claims about interpretability) which together would make me surprised if 131K was near the max of possible numbers of live features even in small models.
I don't think zero ablation is that great a baseline. We're mostly using it for continuity's sake with Anthropic's prior work (and also it's a bit easier to explain than a mean ablation baseline which requires specifying where the mean is calculated from). In the updated paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16014v2 (up in a few hours) we show all the CE loss numbers for anyone to scale how they wish.
I don't think compute efficiency hit[1] is ideal. It's really expensive to compute, since you can't just calculate it from an SAE alone as you need to know facts about smaller LLMs. It also doesn't transfer as well between sites (splicing in an attention layer SAE doesn't impact loss much, splicing in an MLP SAE impacts loss more, and residual stream SAEs impact loss the most). Overall I expect it's a useful expensive alternative to loss recovered, not a replacement.
EDIT: on consideration of Leo's reply, I think my point about transfer is wrong; a metric like "compute efficiency recovered" could always be created by rescaling the compute efficiency number.
What I understand "compute efficiency hit" to mean is: for a given (SAE, ) pair, how much less compute you'd need (as a multiplier) to train a different LM, such that gets the same loss as -with-the-SAE-spliced-in.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the reinitialization approach" but feature death doesn't seem to be a major issue at the moment. At all sites besides L27, our Gemma-7B SAEs didn't have much feature death at all (stats at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16014v2 up in a few hours), and also the Anthropic update suggests even in small models the problem can be addressed.
The "This should be cited" part of Dan H's comment was edited in after the author's reply. I think this is in bad faith since it masks an accusation of duplicate work as a request for work to be cited.
On the other hand the post's authors did not act in bad faith since they were responding to an accusation of duplicate work (they were not responding to a request to improve the work).
(The authors made me aware of this fact)
I think this discussion is sad, since it seems both sides assume bad faith from the other side. On one hand, I think Dan H and Andy Zou have improved the post by suggesting writing about related work, and signal-boosting the bypassing refusal result, so should be acknowledged in the post (IMO) rather than downvoted for some reason. I think that credit assignment was originally done poorly here (see e.g. "Citing others" from this Chris Olah blog post), but the authors resolved this when pushed.
But on the other hand, "Section 6.2 of the RepE paper shows exactly this" and accusations of plagiarism seem wrong @Dan H. Changing experimental setups and scaling them to larger models is valuable original work.
(Disclosure: I know all authors of the post, but wasn't involved in this project)
(ETA: I added the word "bypassing". Typo.)
> think hard about how joining a scaling lab might inhibit their future careers by e.g. creating a perception they are “corrupted”
Does this mean something like:
1. People who join scaling labs can have their values drift, and future safety employers will suspect by-default that ex-scaling lab staff have had their values drift, or
2. If there is a non-existential AGI disaster, scaling lab staff will be looked down upon
or something else entirely?