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Leo Gao

6 accepted papers

2026

Weight-sparse transformers have interpretable circuits

ICML 2026poster

Finding human-understandable circuits in language models is a central goal of the field of mechanistic interpretability. We train models to have more understandable circuits by constraining most of their weights to be zeros, so that each neuron only has a few connections. To recover fine-grained cir…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders

ICLR 2025oral

Sparse autoencoders provide a promising unsupervised approach for extracting interpretable features from a language model by reconstructing activations from a sparse bottleneck layer. Since language models learn many concepts, autoencoders need to be very large to recover all relevant features. Howe…

2024

Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision

ICML 2024oral

Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior---for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated safe outputs. However, future superhuman models will behave…

Cited by 260SourcePDFScholar
2022

Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization

ICLR 2022spotlight

Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models’ pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot genera…