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Main Authors: Wu, Wilson, Jaburi, Louis, Drori, Jacob, Gross, Jason
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07476
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author Wu, Wilson
Jaburi, Louis
Drori, Jacob
Gross, Jason
author_facet Wu, Wilson
Jaburi, Louis
Drori, Jacob
Gross, Jason
contents A recent line of work in mechanistic interpretability has focused on reverse-engineering the computation performed by neural networks trained on the binary operation of finite groups. We investigate the internals of one-hidden-layer neural networks trained on this task, revealing previously unidentified structure and producing a more complete description of such models in a step towards unifying the explanations of previous works (Chughtai et al., 2023; Stander et al., 2024). Notably, these models approximate equivariance in each input argument. We verify that our explanation applies to a large fraction of networks trained on this task by translating it into a compact proof of model performance, a quantitative evaluation of the extent to which we faithfully and concisely explain model internals. In the main text, we focus on the symmetric group S5. For models trained on this group, our explanation yields a guarantee of model accuracy that runs 3x faster than brute force and gives a >=95% accuracy bound for 45% of the models we trained. We were unable to obtain nontrivial non-vacuous accuracy bounds using only explanations from previous works.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a unified and verified understanding of group-operation networks
Wu, Wilson
Jaburi, Louis
Drori, Jacob
Gross, Jason
Machine Learning
A recent line of work in mechanistic interpretability has focused on reverse-engineering the computation performed by neural networks trained on the binary operation of finite groups. We investigate the internals of one-hidden-layer neural networks trained on this task, revealing previously unidentified structure and producing a more complete description of such models in a step towards unifying the explanations of previous works (Chughtai et al., 2023; Stander et al., 2024). Notably, these models approximate equivariance in each input argument. We verify that our explanation applies to a large fraction of networks trained on this task by translating it into a compact proof of model performance, a quantitative evaluation of the extent to which we faithfully and concisely explain model internals. In the main text, we focus on the symmetric group S5. For models trained on this group, our explanation yields a guarantee of model accuracy that runs 3x faster than brute force and gives a >=95% accuracy bound for 45% of the models we trained. We were unable to obtain nontrivial non-vacuous accuracy bounds using only explanations from previous works.
title Towards a unified and verified understanding of group-operation networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07476