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Alexandre Variengien

3 accepted papers

2025

Look Before You Leap: Universal Emergent Mechanism for Retrieval in Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

When solving challenging problems, language models (LMs) are able to identify relevant information from long and complicated contexts. To study how LMs solve retrieval tasks in diverse situations, we introduce ORION, a collection of structured retrieval tasks spanning six domains, from text understa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

How does GPT-2 compute greater-than?: Interpreting mathematical abilities in a pre-trained language model

NeurIPS 2023poster

Pre-trained language models can be surprisingly adept at tasks they were not explicitly trained on, but how they implement these capabilities is poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the basic mathematical abilities often acquired by pre-trained language models. Concretely, we use mechani…

2023

Interpretability in the Wild: a Circuit for Indirect Object Identification in GPT-2 Small

ICLR 2023poster

Research in mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain behaviors of ML models in terms of their internal components. However, most previous work either focuses on simple behaviors in small models, or describes complicated behaviors in larger models with broad strokes. In this work, we bridge this…