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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Maximilian, Janson, Lucas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09951
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author Li, Maximilian
Janson, Lucas
author_facet Li, Maximilian
Janson, Lucas
contents Interpretability studies often involve tracing the flow of information through machine learning models to identify specific model components that perform relevant computations for tasks of interest. Prior work quantifies the importance of a model component on a particular task by measuring the impact of performing ablation on that component, or simulating model inference with the component disabled. We propose a new method, optimal ablation (OA), and show that OA-based component importance has theoretical and empirical advantages over measuring importance via other ablation methods. We also show that OA-based component importance can benefit several downstream interpretability tasks, including circuit discovery, localization of factual recall, and latent prediction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_09951
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal ablation for interpretability
Li, Maximilian
Janson, Lucas
Machine Learning
Interpretability studies often involve tracing the flow of information through machine learning models to identify specific model components that perform relevant computations for tasks of interest. Prior work quantifies the importance of a model component on a particular task by measuring the impact of performing ablation on that component, or simulating model inference with the component disabled. We propose a new method, optimal ablation (OA), and show that OA-based component importance has theoretical and empirical advantages over measuring importance via other ablation methods. We also show that OA-based component importance can benefit several downstream interpretability tasks, including circuit discovery, localization of factual recall, and latent prediction.
title Optimal ablation for interpretability
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09951