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transformer-lens-interpretability

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part of orchestra-research/ai-research-skillsby orchestra-research

The standard workbench for mapping the circuitry inside a language model: which parts feed into which, in what order, and what each of them is carrying while the model works out its answer.

WHEN TO USE

SCOPE

USE FOR

  • Trace which internal activations causally drive a specific model output.
  • Map out a known circuit, such as induction heads or indirect-object identification.
  • Inspect a model's attention patterns and information flow layer by layer.
  • Cache a model's internal activations for further analysis or a sparse autoencoder.
  • Reverse-engineer the algorithm a small transformer learned during training.

NOT FOR

  • Analyzing a non-transformer architecture; nnsight or pyvene support that instead.
  • Training or analyzing sparse autoencoders; SAELens is built for that.
  • Running interpretability experiments remotely on massive models; nnsight with NDIF handles that.
  • Wanting higher-level causal-intervention abstractions; pyvene provides those.