Black-box language model explanation by context length probing

Abstract

The increasingly widespread adoption of large language models has highlighted the need for improving their explainability. We present *context length probing*, a novel explanation technique for causal language models, based on tracking the predictions of a model as a function of the length of available context, and allowing to assign *differential importance scores* to different contexts. The technique is model-agnostic and does not rely on access to model internals beyond computing token-level probabilities. We apply context length probing to large pre-trained language models and offer some initial analyses and insights, including the potential for studying long-range dependencies. The [source code](https://github.com/cifkao/context-probing/) and an [interactive demo](https://cifkao.github.io/context-probing/) of the method are available.