Competence-Based Analysis of Language Models
Keywords: interpretability, probing, causality, interventions, counterfactuals, mechanistic interpretability, language models, linguistic theory, lexical relations
TL;DR: We introduce an LLM interpretability and analysis framework to study implicit causal task structures learned by LLMs using causal probing.
Abstract: Despite the recent successes of large language models (LLMs), little is known regarding the representations of linguistic structure they learn during pretraining, which can lead to unexpected behaviors in response to prompt variation or distribution shift. To better understand these models and behaviors, we introduce a general model analysis framework to study LLMs with respect to their representation and use of human-interpretable linguistic properties. Our framework, CALM (Competence-based Analysis of Language Models), is designed to investigate LLM competence in the context of specific tasks by intervening on models’ internal representations of different linguistic properties using causal probing, and measuring models’ alignment under these interventions with a given ground-truth causal model of the task. We also develop a new approach for performing causal probing interventions using gradient-based adversarial attacks, which can target a broader range of properties and representations than prior techniques. Finally, we carry out a case study of CALM using these interventions to analyze and compare LLM competence across a variety of lexical inference tasks, showing that CALM can be used to explain and predict behaviors across these tasks.
Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI
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Submission Number: 12882
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