“Scaling Sparse Feature Circuit Finding to Gemma 9B” by Diego Caples, Jatin Nainani, CallumMcDougall, rrenaud
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[This is an interim report and continuation of the work from the research sprint done in MATS winter 7 (Neel Nanda's Training Phase)] Try out binary masking for a few residual saes in this colab notebook: [Github Notebook] [Colab Notebook]

** TL;DR: ** We propose a novel approach to:

Scaling SAE Circuits to Large Models: By placing sparse autoencoders only in the residual stream at intervals, we find circuits in models as large as Gemma 9B without requiring SAEs to be trained for every transformer layer. Finding Circuits: We develop a better circuit finding algorithm. Our method optimizes a binary mask over SAE latents, which proves significantly more effective than existing thresholding-based methods like Attribution Patching or Integrated Gradients.

Our discovered circuits paint a clear picture of how Gemma does a given task, with one circuit achieving 95% faithfulness with <20 total latents. This minimality lets us quickly understand the [...]

Outline:

(00:35) TL;DR:

(01:35) 1 Introduction

(04:30) 2 Background

(04:33) 2.1 SAEs

(05:19) 2.2 Circuits

(07:04) 2.3 Problems with Current Sparse Feature Interpretability Approaches

(07:10) 2.3.1 Scalability

(07:44) 2.3.2 Independent Scoring of Nodes

(08:25) 2.3.3 Error Nodes

(10:01) 3 Our Approach

(10:29) 3.1 Solving Scalability: Circuits with few residual SAEs

(11:21) 3.2 Solving Independent Scoring: Masking

(12:08) 3.3 Error nodes

(12:25) 4 Results

(12:29) 4.1 Setup

(13:49) 4.2 Performance Recovery

(15:00) 4.2.1 Code Output Prediction:

(16:48) 4.2.2 Subject Verb Agreement (SVA):

(17:42) 4.2.3 IOI:

(18:55) 4.3 Completeness

(22:22) 4.4 Mask Stability

(23:07) 5 Case Study: Code Output Prediction

(25:09) 6. Conclusions

(27:45) 7. Future Research and Ideas

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First published: January 10th, 2025

Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PkeB4TLxgaNnSmddg/scaling-sparse-feature-circuit-finding-to-gemma-9b)

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