RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations

Jing Huang, Zhengxuan Wu, Christopher Potts, Mor Geva, Atticus Geiger


Abstract
Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute-Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/explanare/ravel.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.470
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8669–8687
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.470
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jing Huang, Zhengxuan Wu, Christopher Potts, Mor Geva, and Atticus Geiger. 2024. RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8669–8687, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations (Huang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.470.pdf