I am not very disciplined about syncing my bluesky and x account, if you are interested what I am up to please check out my x account x.com/wendlerch or website wendlerc.github.io

Our mech interp ICML workshop paper got accepted to ACL 2025 main! 🎉 In this updated version, we extended our results to several models and showed they can actually generate good definitions of mean concept representations across languages.🧵

Can we uncover the list of topics a language model is censored on? Refused topics vary strongly among models. Claude-3.5 vs DeepSeek-R1 refusal patterns:

I am really proud to share our work led by Nikhil Prakash and in collaboration with more mechanistic interpretability and Theory of Mind (ToM) researchers: arxiv.org/abs/2505.14685 You can find a tweet here with nice animations: x.com/nikhil07prak...

Check out Sheridan’s work on concept induction circuits -- the soft version of induction we were promised a while ago :) During our multilingual concept patching experiments I have always been wondering whether it is those circuits doing the work. Finally, some evidence:

In case you ever wondered what you could do if you had SAEs for intermediate results of diffusion models, we trained SDXL Turbo SAEs on 4 blocks for you. We noticed that they specialize into a "composition", a "detail", and a "style" block. And one that is hard to make sense of.

Apply to Akhil's lab, he is great!

Lots of work coming soon to @iclr-conf.bsky.social and @naaclmeeting.bsky.social in April/May! Come chat with us about new methods for interpreting and editing LLMs, multilingual concept representations, sentence processing mechanisms, and arithmetic reasoning. 🧵

Excited about recent reasoning models? What is happening under the hood? Join ARBOR: Analysis of Reasoning Behaviors thru *Open Research* - a radically open collaboration to reverse-engineer reasoning models! Learn more: arborproject.github.io 1/N

This seems like an elegant idea!

DeepSeek R1 shows how important it is to be studying the internals of reasoning models. Try our code: Here @canrager.bsky.social shows a method for auditing AI bias by probing the internal monologue. dsthoughts.baulab.info I'd be interested in your thoughts.

The AI agent spectrum Separating different classes of AI agents from a long history of reinforcement learning. Why we can be optimistic for AI agents but also extremely critical of the terrible communications around them to date. Plus, some policy guidance.

The resources you find online on transformers are just next level... My jaw dropped when I first stumbled upon this video series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3NQ...

Ok, it is yesterdays news already, but good night sleep is important. After 7 amazing years at Google Brain/DM, I am joining OpenAI. Together with @xzhai.bsky.social and @giffmana.ai, we will establish OpenAI Zurich office. Proud of our past work and looking forward to the future.

bit grumpy but great summary of the tokenformer paper www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfU5...

Can we understand and control how language models balance context and prior knowledge? Our latest paper shows it’s all about a 1D knob! 🎛️ arxiv.org/abs/2411.07404 Co-led with @kevdududu.bsky.social - @niklasstoehr.bsky.social , Giovanni Monea, @wendlerc.bsky.social, Robert West & Ryan Cotterell.

In case you also wondered how to derive the maximal update parametrisation (muP) learning rate for ADAM. I did a short write up: tinyurl.com/mup-for-adam. Thanks Ilia Badanin and Eugene Golikov for your help on this.