Papers › RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations

RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations

27 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.17700archive 2025-07-28

Jing Huang, Zhengxuan Wu, Christopher Potts, Mor Geva, Atticus Geiger

Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute-Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/explanare/ravel.

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