Hypothesis Testing the Circuit Hypothesis in LLMs
Authors: Claudia Shi, Nicolas Beltran Velez, Achille Nazaret, Carolina Zheng, Adrià Garriga-Alonso, Andrew Jesson, Maggie Makar, David Blei
NeurIPS 2024 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details
| Reproducibility Variable | Result | LLM Response |
|---|---|---|
| Research Type | Experimental | We apply these tests to six circuits described in the research literature. We find that synthetic circuits circuits that are hard-coded in the model align with the idealized properties. Circuits discovered in Transformer models satisfy the criteria to varying degrees. |
| Researcher Affiliation | Collaboration | 1Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, USA 2Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA 3FAR AI, USA |
| Pseudocode | Yes | Algorithm 1: Tail Test |
| Open Source Code | Yes | To facilitate future empirical studies of circuits, we created the circuitry package, a wrapper around the Transformer Lens library, which abstracts away lower-level manipulations of hooks and activations. The software is available at https: //github.com/blei-lab/circuitry. |
| Open Datasets | Yes | We use the dataset provided by Wang et al. [2023] following the structure above. [...] We use the dataset provided by Conmy et al. [2023] which contains 40 sequences of 300 tokens from the validation split of Open Web Text Gokaslan and Cohen [2019] filtered to include instances of induction. [...] We use the dataset provided by Heimersheim and Janiak [2023] following the structure above. |
| Dataset Splits | Yes | We use the dataset provided by Conmy et al. [2023] which contains 40 sequences of 300 tokens from the validation split of Open Web Text Gokaslan and Cohen [2019] filtered to include instances of induction. |
| Hardware Specification | Yes | Our package is implemented efficiently, and can evaluate hundreds of circuits in a few minutes on a single A5000 GPU. |
| Software Dependencies | No | The paper mentions using the 'Transformer Lens' library and their own 'circuitry package', but it does not provide specific version numbers for these software dependencies, which is required for reproducibility. |
| Experiment Setup | Yes | We draw 100 random circuits to form the reference distribution for the sufficiency and partial necessity tests. For minimality, we draw 10, 000 random edges for G-T and IOI and 1000 random edges for the other circuits. In all experiments, we use Eq. 1 with ℓ2 norm as the faithfulness metric. We set q to be 0.9 and α to be 0.05. |