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A global workspace in language models

anthropic.com

21–30 of 218 posts

Re: A global workspace in language models

#21
Anyone remember that blog post from a few months back where someone was able to improve a model's math ability by just duplicating layers that were activated while solving math problems? Just literally copy/pasting them and linking them together so the model ran through the same layers again?

I get the feeling a lot more research is going to come out in the area of exploring exactly what portions of a model's weights do what.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#22
post #6

I’m confused where in the weights the jspace is.

It's not in the weights. Sounds to me like jspace is the "positive cone" over relevant (large norm) j-lenses, and j-lenses are gradients wrt tokens on the residual stream when you average over some training data.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#23
post #21

Anyone remember that blog post from a few months back where someone was able to improve a model's math ability by just duplicating layers that were activated while solving math problems? Just literally copy/pasting them and linking them together so the model ran through the same layers again? I get the feeling a lot more research is going to come out in the area of exploring exactly what portions of a model's weights…

Yeah! I still think about that sometimes. Mind-blowing that worked at all, let alone improved performance.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#24
post #6

I’m confused where in the weights the jspace is.

There was a series of blog posts posted to HN a while ago investigating how models behave on similar prompts in different languages. To paraphrase the results: the first couple layers map the query to some internal encoding that's mostly independent of the language. Then there are layers in the middle, then the last couple layers map the result back to the target language. You can actually take those middle layers and repeat them, and you get a stronger model. Those middle layers would be what Anthropic calls the J-Space, and their J-Lens maps activity in those layers back to tokens that trigger similar activity (with a technique they only drop hints at)

The finding that you can repeat the middle layers pairs neatly with Anthropic's finding that there is some internal CoT-like process happening in them. I'm not sure how to find those blog posts, but maybe someone else remembers them

Re: A global workspace in language models

#25
post #6

I’m confused where in the weights the jspace is.

It's been shown that LLMs use their outer layers to decode from and encode to language, while their middle layers deal in language-independent abstract concepts. This means that the same question or statement in different languages activates the outer layers differently but produces the same patterns in the middle layers. Check this article with cool visualizations (btw, this is one of the articles mentioned also by a sibling answer):

https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/sapir-whorf/

The middle layers also perform reasoning on the abstract concepts, to the point that you can replicate some blocks of inner layers (thus giving the LLM more internal "reasoning space") and by this increase the model's reasoning abilities. The video in this article shows that when performing a sequence of arithmetic operations (without CoT, i.e. the result is spit out directly), internally the intermediate calculations are spelled out, and this can only happen in the depth direction of the LLM (since no new token is added to the sequence). So this "jspace" can only be situated in the middle layers, probably in circuits that repeat nearly identical across several layers.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#26
post #21

Anyone remember that blog post from a few months back where someone was able to improve a model's math ability by just duplicating layers that were activated while solving math problems? Just literally copy/pasting them and linking them together so the model ran through the same layers again? I get the feeling a lot more research is going to come out in the area of exploring exactly what portions of a model's weights…

If dirt-simple type operations like copy-paste yield useful improvements with even a small probability that would seem to open things up for adaptive reconfiguration and whole other classes of optimizations like genetic algorithms.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#27
post #21

Anyone remember that blog post from a few months back where someone was able to improve a model's math ability by just duplicating layers that were activated while solving math problems? Just literally copy/pasting them and linking them together so the model ran through the same layers again? I get the feeling a lot more research is going to come out in the area of exploring exactly what portions of a model's weights…

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500709

Part 3 might be the best introduction: https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/sapir-whorf/

tl;dr: Based on experiments with similar prompts translated to different languages LLM layers group into three phases: the first decodes from the source language into an abstract space, the middle does something, then there's a last part where the abstract result gets transformed back to the target language. And you can repeat the middle to get a stronger model. Which neatly fits Anthropic's findings here that something similar to CoT is happening in those middle layers

Three months ago. I wonder if Anthropic's J-Space research was actually inspired by those blog posts

Re: A global workspace in language models

#28
post #21

Anyone remember that blog post from a few months back where someone was able to improve a model's math ability by just duplicating layers that were activated while solving math problems? Just literally copy/pasting them and linking them together so the model ran through the same layers again? I get the feeling a lot more research is going to come out in the area of exploring exactly what portions of a model's weights…

Source for those interested

https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/rys/

Re: A global workspace in language models

#29
This is fascinating research. I feel this is a significant leap in interpretability research. Since we know J-Space exists and is bi-directional, we can train models on the same and come up with meta cognition abilities.

I also fear that the big corporations might use the same to run targeted ads, capitalistic shenanigans. Which they might already be doing through system prompts.

Re: A global workspace in language models

#30
>> None of this tells us whether Claude is conscious in the way people are, or whether it feels anything at all

My problem with the entire "Is AI conscious" debate is that we don't even know what exactly consciousness in humans is. You need to understand something in order to compare it to something else. Otherwise you are just comparing different definitions and second order derived phenomena.

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