Papers › Identifying Linear Relational Concepts in Large Language Models

Identifying Linear Relational Concepts in Large Language Models

15 Nov 2023arXiv:2311.08968archive 2025-07-28

David Chanin, Anthony Hunter, Oana-Maria Camburu

Transformer language models (LMs) have been shown to represent concepts as directions in the latent space of hidden activations. However, for any human-interpretable concept, how can we find its direction in the latent space? We present a technique called linear relational concepts (LRC) for finding concept directions corresponding to human-interpretable concepts by first modeling the relation between subject and object as a linear relational embedding (LRE). We find that inverting the LRE and using earlier object layers results in a powerful technique for finding concept directions that outperforms standard black-box probing classifiers. We evaluate LRCs on their performance as concept classifiers as well as their ability to causally change model output.

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