# Transformer Circuits

[Chris Olah](https://www.alignmentforum.org/users/christopher-olah), [Neel Nanda](https://www.alignmentforum.org/users/neel-nanda-1), [Catherine Olsson](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/catherio), Nelson Elhage, and a bunch of other people at [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/) just published “Transformer Circuits,” an application of the [_Circuits_-style](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/MG4ZjWQDrdpgeu8wG/zoom-in-an-introduction-to-circuits) interpretability paradigm to transformer-based language models. From their very top level summary:

> Can we reverse engineer transformer language models into human-understandable computer programs? Inspired by the [Distill Circuits Thread](https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/), we're going to try.

They've chosen to publish their work in an interestingly novel format, publishing their first paper, “[A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2021/framework/index.html),” alongside a [set of YouTube videos](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2021/videos/index.html) that go into even more detail on their findings. I watched the full YouTube playlist, and I found it absolutely fascinating and would highly recommend it as a way to engage with this research.

Some of my high-level takeaways:
- Their signature finding, I think, is that of [induction heads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vea4cfn6TOA&list=PLoyGOS2WIonajhAVqKUgEMNmeq3nEeM51&index=12). I'll let you get the explanation of what they are directly from Chris's video, but essentially they're a very basic mechanism that all transformer-based language models seem to use that drives their ability to “meta-learn”—that is, improve their accuracy over the course of seeing a larger context. Similarly to the exploration of early vision in [_Circuits_](https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/), induction heads give us insight into the basic building blocks of large language models. While I think the authors' did a great job uncovering this basic building block, I think their explanation of meta-learning as primarily being driven by induction heads mostly leads us to a big open research question, which is how exactly induction heads can be put together to produce the more complex phenomenon we see in large language models.[^1]
- Probably their most fascinating finding, in my opinion, was their discovery of the “[induction bump](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jLjtrM1Rn0&list=PLoyGOS2WIonajhAVqKUgEMNmeq3nEeM51&index=13).” I won't try to reexplain exactly what the induction bump is, since I think Catherine's video does such a good job of that, but I will say that, to my knowledge, the authors' exploration of the induction bump is the first time there's ever been a detailed, circuits-level analysis of a _phase-change_ that occurs over the course of training in a discrete way. I think this is especially interesting because a lot of stories that people like to tell about how particular safety problems might arise in neural networks often rely on these sorts of phase-change-style transitions (e.g. [the development of deception](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ocWqg2Pf2br4jMmKA/does-sgd-produce-deceptive-alignment)). It seems to me that the existence of something like the induction bump is suggestive that there might be more of these sorts of phase changes hiding in future large training runs, or even in existing large training runs—as Catherine notes, the bump is pretty easy to miss until you break down the loss into individual tokens.[^2]

[^1]:
     Some possible future research directions related to understanding how induction heads compose:
     * I wonder if there's any sort of general theory of what sorts of computations can be built up of exclusively many layers of induction heads—e.g., as a very simple question, is an induction-heads-only model of computation Turing complete?
     * I also wonder if induction heads can help us understand why language models often get stuck in loops, as induction heads seem like exactly the sorts of things that would be very prone to looping.
     * One very concrete question here is how [the vowel/consonant neuron](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wYNsoycM1U&list=PLoyGOS2WIonajhAVqKUgEMNmeq3nEeM51&index=16) (the one that looks for "an") is able to meta-learn when vowels/consonants are supposed to appear, rather than just looking for hard-coded "an" tokens. That's an example of a really interesting meta-learning behavior that the model is able to do and I'd be interested in seeing if there's a way to understand how it could possible be built up just using induction—that is, if we suppose that induction is all there is, how could induction be put together to produce an effect like that?

[^2]: One thing I'm still struggling to understand related to the induction bump is how it can be the case that, after the induction bump, large models don't do relatively better at meta-learning compared to small models. I found that extremely surprising and I feel like I almost don't believe that that can be the end of the story—qualitatively, we certainly observe much more interesting meta-learning in larger models, and it seems really strange for all of that to just be reflected in an overall loss decrease rather than an increase in the amount of meta-learning. At the very least, I feel like this fact deserves some sort of further explanation—perhaps there are other interesting phase changes hiding in later parts of the loss function that might help explain what's going on here, or perhaps the claim that [the whole phenomenon of “meta-learning” is just task recognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pv7Qpu8WSge8NRbpB/larger-language-models-may-disappoint-you-or-an-eternally#4d__just_how_much_does_prompting_suck_) could help shed some light on this result.

Overall, I think this is clearly the most exciting progress in transparency and interpretability in general since [_Circuits_](https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/)—and I'm really happy to see it happening in language models, as I've [previously emphasized I think is important for us to focus on](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/cQwT8asti3kyA62zc/automating-auditing-an-ambitious-concrete-technical-research#Step_1__The_auditing_game_for_language_models). One thing that I think really sets this sort of transparency and interpretability work apart from the rest is the authors' emphasis on understanding the mechanistic building blocks underlying their models—with [the hope of eventually being able to reverse-engineer them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2i9dQQK3gETCyqh2/chris-olah-s-views-on-agi-safety#What_if_interpretability_breaks_down_as_AI_gets_more_powerful_)—rather than just, for example, trying to give humans tools to predict what models are doing (without the output of those tools necessarily having any correspondence to what the models are actually doing).