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The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- akarshkumar0101 1y agoTweet: https://x.com/kenneth0stanley/status/1924650124829196370 https://x.com/kenneth0stanley/status/1924650124829196370 Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11581 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11581
- pvg 1y agoSounds like you're one of the co-authors? Probably worth mentioning if the case so people know they can discuss the work with one of the work-doers.
- akarshkumar0101 1y agoI mentioned that in the original post, but I don't see that text here anymore (thats why I added links via comment)... I am new to hackernews
- messe 1y agoI believe they just mean that you should edit the comment where you added the links to mention that you are the author, to add that additional context.
- pvg 1y agoI just meant 'it's good for people to know one of the authors is in the thread because it makes for more interesting conversation'. Clearly did not figure out how to do that without starting a bunch of meta!
- macintux 1y agoI believe this could (or should) have been a Show HN, which would have allowed you to include explanatory text. See the top of this page for the rules. https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show Welcome to the site. There are a lot of features which are less obvious, which you’ll discover over time.
- pvg 1y agoReading material usually can't be a Show HN but you can just post your work without that and say you're involved.
- macintux 1y agoThe repo includes runnable code. > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with… On topic: things people can run on their computers or hold in their hands
- pvg 1y agoA lot of writing includes runnable code and isn't a Show HN. It's a comparatively narrow category.
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- ipunchghosts 1y agoI am interested in doing research like this. Is there any way I can be a part of it or a similar group? I have been fighting for funding from DoD for many years but to no avail so I largely have to do this research on my own time or solve my current grant's problems so that i can work on this. In my mind, this kind of research is the most interesting and important right now in the deep learning field. I am a hard worker and a high-throughput thinking... how can i get connected to otherwise with a similar mindset?
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- scarmig 1y agoDid you investigate other search processes besides SGD? I'm thinking of those often termed "biologically plausible" (e.g. forward-forward, FA). Are their internal representations closer to the fractured or unified representations?
- timewizard 1y ago> Much of the excitement in modern AI is driven by the observation that scaling up existing systems leads to better performance. Scaling up almost always leads to better performance. If you're only getting linear gains though then there is absolutely nothing to be excited about. You are in a dead end.
- goldemerald 1y agoThis is an interesting line of research but missing a key aspect: there's (almost) no references to the linear representation hypothesis. Much work on neural network interpretability lately has shown individual neurons are polysemantic, and therefore practically useless for explainability. My hypothesis is fitting linear probes (or a sparse autoencoder) would reveal linearly semantic attributes. It is unfortunate because they briefly mention Neel Nanda's Othello experiments, but not the wide array of experiments like the NeurIPS Oral "Linear Representation Hypothesis in Language Models" or even golden gate Claude.
- ipunchghosts 1y agoIs what your saying imply that there is a rotation matrix you can apply to each activation output to make it less entangled?
- goldemerald 1y agoNot quite. For an underlying semantic concept (e.g., smiling face), you can go from a basis vector [0,1,0,...,0] to the original latent space via a single rotation. You could then induce said concept by manipulating the original latent point by traversing along that linear direction.
- ipunchghosts 1y agoI think we are saying the same thing. Please correct me though where I am wrong. You could look at the maps in some way but instead of the basis being one hot dimensions (the standard basis), it could be rotated.
- akarshkumar0101 1y agoWe mention this issue exactly in the fourth paragraph in Section 4 and in Appendix F!
- akarshkumar0101 1y ago
- ipunchghosts 1y agoI am glad they evaluated this hypothesis using weight decay which is primarily thought of to induce a structured representation. My first thought was that the entire paper was useless if they didn't do this experiment. I find it rather interesting that the structured representations go from sparse to full to sparse as a function of layer depth. I have noticed that applying weight decay penalty as an exponential function of layer depth gives improved results over using a global weight decay.
- cwmoore 1y agoIsn't this simply mirroronic gravitation?
- light_hue_1 1y ago"I looked at the representations of a network and I don't like them". Great! There's no mathematical definition of what a fractured representation is. It's whatever art preferences you have. Our personal preferences aren't a good predictor of which network will work well. We wasted decades with classical AI and graphical models encoding our aesthetic into models. Just to find out that the results are totally worthless. Can we stop please? I get it. I too like beautiful things. But we can't hold on to things that don't work. Entire fields like linguistics are dying because they refuse to abandon this nonsense.