Sparse Feature Circuits: Discovering and Editing Interpretable Causal Graphs in Language Models

This repository contains code, data, and links to autoencoders for replicating the experiments of Sparse Feature Circuits: Discovering and Editing Interpretable Causal Graphs in Language Models.

Demos and Links

• We provide an interface for exploring and downloading clusters here.
• View our SAEs and their features on Neuronpedia.

Installation

Use python >= 3.10. To install dependencies, use

pip install -r requirements.txt

You will also need to clone the dictionary learning repository. Run this command from the root directory of this repository to get that code:

git submodule update --init

Data

Subject–Verb Agreement

We create modified versions of the stimuli from Finlayson et al. (2021) (code here). Specifically, we use the same nouns and structures, but modify the verb sets to only include those whose singular and plural inflections are single tokens in Pythia. Our data may be found in data/.

We use different splits for discovering circuits and evaluating faithfulness/completeness. The *_train files are those we use to discover circuits (typically with 100-example subsamples); the *_test files are those we use for evaluation.

Bias in Bios

We download the Bias in Bios dataset from Huggingface. We write functions to subsample the data for our classifier experiments; see the Bias in Bios experiment notebook.

Cluster Data

We provide an online interface for observing and downloading clusters here.

Autoencoders

To run our experiments, you will need to either train or download sparse autoencoders for each layer of Pythia 70M. You can download dictionaries using the script provided at our dictionary learning repository. Running that script from the feature-circuits home directory should download the dictionaries to dictionaries/pythia-70m-deduped/, which is where this repo expects to find them.

Annotations

We provide feature annotations in annotations/10_32768.jsonl. These are primarily used in circuit_plotting.py.

Experiments

Here, we provide instructions for replicating the results from our paper.

Subject–Verb Agreement

To discover a circuit, use the following command:

scripts/get_circuit.sh <data_type> <node_threshold> <edge_threshold> <aggregation> <example_length> <dict_id>

For example, to discover a sparse feature circuit for agreement across a relative clause using node threshold 0.1 and edge threshold 0.01, and with no aggregation across token positions, run this command:

scripts/get_circuit.sh rc_train 0.1 0.01 none 6 10

If you would like a circuit composed of model components instead of sparse features, replace "10" with "id".

By default, this will save a circuit in circuits/, and a circuit plot in circuits/figures/.

To evaluate the faithfulness and completeness of circuits across a variety of thresholds, see experiments/faithfulness.ipynb. To evaluate just a single circuit, use the following command:

scripts/evaluate_circuit.sh <circuit_path> <data_type> <node_threshold> <example_length> <dict_id>

For example, to evaluate the faithfulness and completeness if the agreement across RC circuit with node threshold 0.1, you can run

scripts/evaluate_circuit.sh circuits/rc_train_dict10_node0.1_edge0.01_n100_aggnone.pt rc_test 0.1 6 10

Bias in Bios

All code for replicating our data processing, classifier training, and SHIFT method (including all baselines and skylines) can be found in experiments/bib_shift.ipynb.

To generate a circuit for the BiB classifier, use experiments/bib_circuit.ipynb

Clusters

After downloading a cluster, run this script:

scripts/get_circuit_nopair.sh <data_path> <node_threshold> <edge_threshold> <dict_id>

data_path should be the full path to a cluster .json in the same format as those that can be downloaded here. By default, this will save a circuit in circuits/ and a circuit plot in circuits/figures/.

General utilties

The following files contain utilities which are generally useful for our circuit discovery methods:

• attribution.py implements methods for attributing model behaviors to SAE features and error terms.
• activation_utils.py defines the SparseAct object, which bundles together feature activations and error terms in a convenient way and provides utilities for working with them in a unified way.
• ablation.py implements general methods useful for performing SAE feature ablations
• circuit.py contains our circuit discovery code
• circuit_plotting.py contains our code for plotting circuits, once discovered.
• loading_utils.py contains utilities for working with our subject-verb agreement datasets and clusters.

Citation

If you use any of the code or ideas presented here, please cite our paper:

@article{marks-etal-2024-feature,
    author={Samuel Marks and Can Rager and Eric J. Michaud and Yonatan Belinkov and David Bau and Aaron Mueller},
    title={Sparse Feature Circuits: Discovering and Editing Interpretable Causal Graphs in Language Models},
    year={2024},
    journal={Computing Research Repository},
    volume={arXiv:2403.19647},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19647}
}

License

We release source code for this work under an MIT license.