Open Source XAI - Circuit tracer for Causal Explainability

[virajsharma2000]

In this talk, I propose to discuss the problem of building explainable AI with the two approaches - causal vs correlational.

I will talk about what mech interp is in large language models like Gemma. It's a way to understand how models answer questions by looking inside them and checking which neurons activate when.

I will discuss the Anthropic's open sourced a python module - circuit-tracer, and also the Neuronpedia portal , helps us find neurons linked to real-world concepts. We will examine specific prompts on transformers and understand the various paths and thoughts that make use reach the output. (It is veery interesting - for me)

I will also talk about my own work on mech interp tooling (modelrecon) - with "activation cube" data structure (this is not a standard - I came up with it) as a means to share and visualize activation data. And also the "counterfactual" library that I am working on to correctly implement intervention testing

My code:

https://github.com/modelrecon

My slides:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FNd37jW3nB95lko2imfk6A7VGVG0S0H53hUgWocYJ1g/edit?usp=sharing

[virajsharma2000]

basic problem of causal vs. correlational techniques and the limitations of corrlational.

Why Explainability Matters 2-3 mins

We need to understand why AI models make certain choices, not just what answers they give. Without this, the model feels like a black box. - in this I will include example of human behavior

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What Transformers Hide 2-3 mins

I will talk about basic transformers internal steps and features that are hard to see. highliting that tools only show the final output, not the thinking process. Infact - I will highlight that it comes as a surpirse to normal people that we dont know how models "actually" arrive at specific answers. -

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How Circuit Tracer Helps 3 - 5 mins

I will talk about how Anthropic’s Circuit Tracer shows the inside connections of the model.
It turns hidden activations into easy-to-understand features and shows how they link together. It not that easy, but we can get used to the graphs (like the link guy in the matrix movie- he could just understand by looking at the matrix runtime code) - I will show some graphs and walk through the reasoning path on colab

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Seeing the Reasoning Path 10 minutes or more

The tool draws a clear path from
input → inner features → final output
This lets everyone see which parts of the model caused the answer. _ this would be fun as the type of path a model takes are weird sometimes.

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Why This Is Important 2 minutes

With this method, we can:

• check if the model is behaving safely
• fix mistakes inside the model
• build trust by seeing how it thinks

I will finish with description with some of my work around activation cube data and pytorch hook mechanism and other options for logging data.