I speculate that at least three factors made CCS viral:
Did you try searching for similar ideas to your work in the broader academic literature? There seems to be lots of closely related work that you'd find interesting. For example:
Elite BackProp: Training Sparse Interpretable Neurons. They train CNNs to have "class-wise activation sparsity." They claim their method achieves "high degrees of activation sparsity with no accuracy loss" and "can assist in understanding the reasoning behind a CNN."
Accelerating Convolutional Neural Networks via Activation Map Compression. They "propose a three-stage compression and acceleration pipeline that sparsifies, quantizes, and entropy encodes activation maps of Convolutional Neural Networks." The sparsification step adds an L1 penalty to the activations in the network, which they do at finetuning time. The work just examines accuracy, not interpretability.
Enhancing Adversarial Defense by -Winners-Take-All. Proposes the -Winners-Take-All activation function, which keeps only the largest activations and sets all other activations to 0. This is a drop-in replacement during neural network training, and they find it improves adversarial robustness in image classification. How Can We Be So Dense? The Benefits of Using Highly Sparse Representations also uses the -Winners-Take-All activation function, among other sparsification techniques.
The Neural LASSO: Local Linear Sparsity for Interpretable Explanations. Adds an L1 penalty to the gradient wrt the input. The intuition is to make the final output have a "sparse local explanation" (where "local explanation" = input gradient)
Adaptively Sparse Transformers. They replace softmax with -entmax, "a differentiable generalization of softmax that allows low-scoring words to receive precisely zero weight." They claim "improve[d] interpretability and [attention] head diversity" and also that "at no cost in accuracy, sparsity in attention heads helps to uncover different head specializations."
Interpretable Neural Predictions with Differentiable Binary Variables. They train two neural networks. One "selects a rationale (i.e. a short and informative part of the input text)", and the other "classifies... from the words in the rationale alone."
I ask because your paper doesn't seem to have a related works section, and most of your citations in the intro are from other safety research teams (eg Anthropic, OpenAI, CAIS, and Redwood.)
Neat to see the follow-up from your introductory prediction post on this project!
In my prediction I was particularly interested in the following stats:
1. If you put the cheese in the top-left and bottom-right of the largest maze size, what fraction of the time does the out-of-the-box policy you trained go to the cheese?
2. If you try to edit the mouse's activations to make it go to the top left or bottom right of the largest mazes (leaving the cheese wherever it spawned by default in the top right), what fraction of the time do you succeed in getting the mouse to go to the top left or bottom right? What percentage of network activations are you modifying when you do this?
Do you have these stats? I read some, but not all, of this post, and I didn't see answers to these questions.
Neat experimental setup. Goal misgeneralization is one of the things I'm most worried about in advanced AI, so I'm excited to see you studying it in more detail!
I want to jot-down my freeform analysis of what I expect to happen. (I wrote these predictions independently, without looking at anyone else's analysis.)
In very small mazes, I think the mouse will behave as if it's following this algorithm: find the shortest path to the cheese location. In very large mazes, I think the mouse will behave as if it's following this algorithm: first, go to the top-right region of the maze. Then, go to the exact location of the cheese. As we increase the maze size, I expect the mouse to have a phase transition from the first behavior to the second behavior. I don't know at exactly what size the phase transition will occur.
I expect that for very small mazes, the mouse will learn how to optimally get to the cheese, no matter where the cheese is.
I expect that for very large mazes, the mouse will act as follows: it will first just try to go to the top-right region of the maze. Once it gets to the top-right region of the maze, it will start trying to find the cheese exactly. My guess is that there's a trigger in the model's head for when it switches from going to the top-right corner to finding the cheese exactly. I'd guess this trigger activates either when the mouse is in the top-right corner of the maze, or when the mouse is near the cheese. (Or perhaps a mixture of both these triggers exists in the model's head.)
Another question is: Will we be able to infer the exact cheese location by just looking at the model's internal activations?
Thanks for writing. I think this is a useful framing!
Where does the term "structural" come from?
The related literature I've seen uses the word "systemic", eg, the field of system safety. A good example is this talk (and slides, eg slide 24).
Thanks for writing this! I appreciate it and hope you share more things that you write faster without totally polishing everything.
One word of caution I'd share is: beware of spending too much effort running experiments on toy examples. I think toy examples are useful to gain conceptual clarity. However, if your idea is primarily empirical (such as an improvement to a deep neural network architecture), then I would recommend spending basically zero time running toy experiments.
With deep learning, it's often the case that improvements on toy examples don't scale to being improvements on real examples. In my experience, lots of papers in reinforcement learning don't actually work because the authors only tried out the method on toy examples. (Or, they tried out the method on more complex examples, but they didn't publish those experiments because the method didn't work.) So trying out a new empirical method on a toy example provides little information about how valuable the empirical method will be on real examples.
The flipside of this warning is advice: for empirical projects, test your idea on as diverse and complex a set of tasks as is possible. The good empirical ideas are few, and extensive empirical testing is the best way a researcher can determine if their idea will stand the test of time.
When running diverse and complex experiments, it is still important to design the simplest possible experiment that will be informative, as Lawrence describes in the section "Mock or simplify difficult components." I suggest being simple (such as Lawrence's example of using text-davinci-003 instead of finetuning one's own model) rather than being toy (using a tiny or hard-coded language model).
I'd be interested to hear in more detail why you're unconvinced.
I think the main reasons to work on mechanistic interp do not look like "we can literally understand all the cognition behind a powerful AI", but instead "we can bound the behavior of the AI"
I assume "bound the behavior" means provide a worst-case guarantee. But if we don't understand all the cognition, how can we provide such a guarantee? How do we know that the part of the AI we don't understand wouldn't ruin our guarantee?
we can help other, weaker AIs understand the powerful AI
My understanding of interpretability is that humans understand what the AI is doing. Weaker AIs understanding the powerful AI doesn't feel like a solution to interpretability. Instead it feels like a solution to amplification that's still uninterpretable by humans.
What do you think are the top 3 (or top 5, or top handful) of interpretability results to date? If I gave a 5-minute talk called "The Few Greatest Achievements of Interpretability to Date," what would you recommend I include in the talk?
Great post. I'm on GDM's new AI safety and alignment team in the Bay Area and hope readers will consider joining us!
What evidence is there that working at a scaling lab risks creating a "corrupted" perception? When I try thinking of examples, the people that come to my mind seem to have quite successfully transitioned from working at a scaling lab to doing nonprofit / government work. For example: