Opening article
Anthropic Research has published a new piece titled Privileged bases in the transformer residual stream. The work examines internal representations within transformer models. Further details are limited as the full article text is unavailable.
Our mathematical theories of the Transformer architecture suggest that individual coordinates in the residual stream should have no special significance (that is, the basis directions should be in some sense "arbitrary" and no more likely to encode information than random directions). Recent work has shown that this observation is false in practice. We investigate this phenomenon and provisionally conclude that the per-dimension normalizers in the Adam optimizer are to blame for the effect.
We explore two other obvious sources of basis dependency in a Transformer: Layer normalization, and finite-precision floating-point calculations. We confidently rule these out as being the source of the observed basis-alignment.
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Understanding the residual stream and internal representations of transformers is crucial for interpreting model behavior and improving AI safety and interpretability.