I disagree with your intuition that we should not expect networks at irreducible loss to not be in superposition.
The reason I brought this up is that there are, IMO, strong first-principle reasons for why SPH should be correct. Say there are two features, which have an independent probability of 0.05 to be present in a given data point, then it would be wasteful to allocate a full neuron to each of these features. The probability of both features being present at the same time is a mere 0.00025. If the superposition is implemented well you get basically two features for the price of one with an error rate of 0.025%. So if there is even a slight pressure towards compression, e.g. by having less available neurons than features, then superposition should be favored by the network.
Now does this toy scenario map to reality? I think it does, and in some sense it is even more favorable to SPH since often the presence of features will be anti-correlated.
Ah, I think you’re right here, though I don’t think this means there’s no room for improvement on the sparsity front. Do you know of any hand-constructed examples of a layer in superposition, for which we know the features of? I’d like to play around with one, and see if there’s any robust way to disentangle it.
I agree that all is not lost wrt sparsity and if SPH turns out to be true it might help us disentangle the superimposed features to better understand what is going on. You could think of constructing an “expanded” view of a neural network. The expanded view would allocate one neuron per feature and thus has sparse activations for any given data point and would be easier to reason about. That seems impractical in reality, since the cost of constructing this view might in theory be exponential, as there are exponentially many “almost orthogonal” vectors for a given vector space dimension, as a function of the dimension.
I think my original comment was meant more as a caution against the specific approach of “find an interpretable basis in activation space”, since that might be futile, rather than a caution against all attempts at finding a sparse representation of the computations that are happining within the network.
I don’t think there is anything on that front other than the paragraphs in the SoLU paper. I alluded to a possible experiment for this on Twitter in response to that paper but haven’t had the time to try it out myself: You could take a tiny autoencoder to reconstruct some artificially generated data where you vary attributes such as sparsity, ratio of input dimensions vs. bottleneck dimensions, etc. You could then look at the weight matrices of the autoencoder to figure out how it’s embedding the features in the bottleneck and which settings lead to superposition, if any.
I’m not at liberty to share it directly but I am aware that Anthropic have a draft of small toy models with hand-coded synthetic data showing superposition very cleanly. They go as far as saying that searching for an interpretable basis may essentially be mistaken.
I disagree with your intuition that we should not expect networks at irreducible loss to not be in superposition.
The reason I brought this up is that there are, IMO, strong first-principle reasons for why SPH should be correct. Say there are two features, which have an independent probability of 0.05 to be present in a given data point, then it would be wasteful to allocate a full neuron to each of these features. The probability of both features being present at the same time is a mere 0.00025. If the superposition is implemented well you get basically two features for the price of one with an error rate of 0.025%. So if there is even a slight pressure towards compression, e.g. by having less available neurons than features, then superposition should be favored by the network.
Now does this toy scenario map to reality? I think it does, and in some sense it is even more favorable to SPH since often the presence of features will be anti-correlated.
Ah, I think you’re right here, though I don’t think this means there’s no room for improvement on the sparsity front. Do you know of any hand-constructed examples of a layer in superposition, for which we know the features of? I’d like to play around with one, and see if there’s any robust way to disentangle it.
I agree that all is not lost wrt sparsity and if SPH turns out to be true it might help us disentangle the superimposed features to better understand what is going on. You could think of constructing an “expanded” view of a neural network. The expanded view would allocate one neuron per feature and thus has sparse activations for any given data point and would be easier to reason about. That seems impractical in reality, since the cost of constructing this view might in theory be exponential, as there are exponentially many “almost orthogonal” vectors for a given vector space dimension, as a function of the dimension.
I think my original comment was meant more as a caution against the specific approach of “find an interpretable basis in activation space”, since that might be futile, rather than a caution against all attempts at finding a sparse representation of the computations that are happining within the network.
I don’t think there is anything on that front other than the paragraphs in the SoLU paper. I alluded to a possible experiment for this on Twitter in response to that paper but haven’t had the time to try it out myself: You could take a tiny autoencoder to reconstruct some artificially generated data where you vary attributes such as sparsity, ratio of input dimensions vs. bottleneck dimensions, etc. You could then look at the weight matrices of the autoencoder to figure out how it’s embedding the features in the bottleneck and which settings lead to superposition, if any.
I’m not at liberty to share it directly but I am aware that Anthropic have a draft of small toy models with hand-coded synthetic data showing superposition very cleanly. They go as far as saying that searching for an interpretable basis may essentially be mistaken.