danwil

Karma: 48

danwil 10 Jan 2026 22:34 UTC
7 points
4
on: A Proposal for a Better ARENA: Shifting from Teaching to Research Sprints
Some brief feedback on the structure:
- Realistically, students will be rusty and not able to immediately understand/code all four research areas. As a group, they likely will decide to review/redo relevant ARENA sections to ensure shared understanding.
- Due to this, I suspect the organizers will have to provide very specific, ~20-30 hour projects with concrete goals/scaffolding. Otherwise, students will feel lost or overwhelmed having only a week both to get up to speed and do the research project. This is time for quick initial explorations but not much else.
- It’s very likely this program will also need TAs. Given how quickly it switches topics, students will have tooling/code issues that take hours to resolve. They may also get lost or stuck not knowing what to try next.
IMO ARENA is about bringing skilled coders to the research frontier, and showing how to quickly run experiments. If you instead make ARENA a prereq, you will lose out on many talented coders who don’t have time to complete it independently. So I would consider this moreso a follow-up to ARENA to teach research skills than a replacement.

Widening AI Safety’s talent pipeline by meeting people where they are

Ruben Castaing, yanni kyriacos, Nelson Gardner-Challis and danwil

25 Sep 2025 20:50 UTC

33 points

3 comments8 min readLW link

danwil 11 Nov 2024 3:29 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
In entrepreneurship, there is the phrase “ideas are worthless”. This is because everyone already has lots of ideas they believe are promising. Hence, a pre-business idea is unlikely to be stolen.
Similarly, every LLM researcher already has a backlog of intriguing hypotheses paired with evidence. So an outside idea would have to seem more promising than the backlog. Likely this will require the proposer to prove something beyond evidence.
For example, Krizhevsky/Sutskever/Hinton had the idea of applying then-antiquated neural nets to recognize images. Only when they validated this in the ImageNet competition did their idea attract more researchers.
This is why ideas/hypotheses—even with a bit of evidence—are not considered very useful. What would be useful is to conclusively prove an idea true. This would attract lots of researchers … but it turns out to be incredibly difficult to do, and in some cases requires sophisticated techniques. (The same applies to entrepreneurship. Few people will join/invest until you validate the idea and lower the risk.)
Sidenote: There are countless stories of academics putting forth original, non-mainstream ideas, only to be initially rejected by their peers (e.g. Cantor’s infinity). I believe this not to be an issue just with outsiders, but merely that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. ML is an interesting example, because lots of so-called outsiders without a PhD now present at conferences!

danwil 9 Nov 2024 1:42 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
If an outsider’s objective is to be taken seriously, they should write papers and submit them to peer review (e.g. conferences and journals).

Yann LeCun has gone so far to say that independent work only counts as “science” if submitted to peer review:

“Without peer review and reproducibility, chances are your methodology was flawed and you fooled yourself into thinking you did something great.”—https://x.com/ylecun/status/1795589846771147018?s=19.

From my experience, professors are very open to discuss ideas and their work with anyone who seems serious, interested, and knowledgeable. Even someone inside academia will face skepticism if their work uses completely different methods. They will have to very convincingly prove the methods are valid.

danwil 13 Aug 2024 8:47 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: Tokenized SAEs: Infusing per-token biases.
Double thanks for the extended discussion and ideas! Also interested to see what happens.
We earlier created some SAEs that completely remove the unigram directions from the encoder (e.g. old/gpt2_resid_pre_8_t8.pt).
However, a ” Golden Gate Bridge” feature individually activates on ” Golden” (plus prior context), ” Gate” (plus prior), and ” Bridge” (plus prior). Without the last-token/unigram directions these tended not to activate directly, complicating interpretability.

danwil 10 Aug 2024 5:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: Tokenized SAEs: Infusing per-token biases.
Yes to both! We varied expansion size for tokenized (8x-32x) and baseline (4x-64x), available in the Google Drive folder expansion-sweep. Just to be clear, our focus was on learning so-called “complex” features that do not solely activate based on the last token. So, we did not use the lookup biases as additional features (only for decoder reconstruction).
That said, ~25% of the suggested 64x baseline features are similar to the token-biases (cosine similarity 0.4-0.9). In fact, evolving the token-biases via training substantially increases their similarity (see figure). Smaller expansion sizes have up to 66% similar features and fewer dead features. (related sections above: ‘Dead features’ and ‘Measuring “simple” features’)

danwil 9 Aug 2024 22:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tdooms’s comment on: Tokenized SAEs: Infusing per-token biases.
Additionally:
- We recommend using the gpt2-layers directory, which includes resid_pre layers 5-11, topk=30, 12288 features (the tokenized “t” ones have learned lookup tables, pre-initialized with unigram residuals).
- The folders pareto-sweep, init-sweep, and expansion-sweep contain parameter sweeps, with lookup tables fixed to 2x unigram residuals.
In addition to the code repo linked above, for now here is some quick code that loads the SAE, exposes the lookup table, and computes activations only:
```
import torch

SAE_BASE_PATH = 'gpt2-layers/gpt2_resid_pre'                   # hook_pt = 'resid_pre'

layer = 8
state_dict = torch.load(f'{SAE_BASE_PATH}_{layer}_ot30.pt')    # o=topk, t=tokenized, k=30
W_lookup = state_dict['lookup.W_lookup.weight']                # per-token decoder biases

def tokenized_activations(state_dict, x):
    'Return pre-relu activations. For simplicity, does not limit to topk.'
    return (x - state_dict['b_dec']) @ state_dict['W_enc'].T + state_dict['b_enc']
```

danwil 9 Aug 2024 7:14 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: Tokenized SAEs: Infusing per-token biases.
Indeed, similar tokens (e.g. “The” vs. ” The”) have similar token-biases (median max-cos-sim 0.89). This is likely because we initialize the biases with the unigram residuals, which mostly retain the same “nearby tokens” as the original embeddings.

Due to this, most token-biases have high cosine similarity to their respective unigram residuals (median 0.91). This indicates that if we use the token-biases as additional features, we can interpret the activations relative to the unigram residuals (as a somewhat un-normalized similarity, due to the dot product).

That said, the token-biases have uniquely interesting properties—for one, they seem to be great “last token detectors”. Suppose we take a last-row residual vector from an arbitrary 128-token prompt. Then, a max-cos-sim over the 50257 token-biases yields the prompt’s exact last token with 88-98% accuracy (layers 10 down to 5), compared to only 35-77% accuracy using unigram residuals (see footnote 2).

Tokenized SAEs: Infusing per-token biases.

tdooms and danwil

4 Aug 2024 9:17 UTC

20 points

20 comments15 min readLW link

danwil

Wi­den­ing AI Safety’s tal­ent pipeline by meet­ing peo­ple where they are

To­k­enized SAEs: In­fus­ing per-to­ken bi­ases.

Widening AI Safety’s talent pipeline by meeting people where they are

Tokenized SAEs: Infusing per-token biases.