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Universal Neurons in GPT-2: Emergence, Persistence, and Functional Impact

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Advey Nandan, Cheng-Ting Chou, Amrit Kurakula, Cole Blondin, Kevin Zhu, Vasu Sharma, Sean O'Brien

Outline

This paper investigates the phenomenon of neuron universality in independently trained GPT-2 Small models. Five GPT-2 models are analyzed at three checkpoints (100k, 200k, and 300k steps), and activation correlation analysis on a 5-million-token dataset identifies universal neurons (neurons with consistently correlated activations across models). Using ablation experiments to measure loss and KL divergence, we reveal the significant functional impact of universal neurons on model predictions. Furthermore, we quantify neuron persistence, demonstrating the high stability of universal neurons across training checkpoints, particularly in deeper layers. These results suggest the emergence of a stable and universal representational structure during neural network training.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
We show that stable and universal representation structures emerge naturally during neural network training.
Experimentally demonstrating that universal neurons have a significant impact on model predictions.
Enhancing our understanding of the model's generalization ability by demonstrating the high stability of universal neurons.
Limitations:
Since the results of this study are limited to the GPT-2 Small model, further research is needed to determine the generalizability of these results to other models or larger models.
Lack of in-depth mechanistic analysis of the functional role of universal neurons.
There is a need to review the impact of the characteristics of the dataset used in the analysis on the results.
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