Julian Minder

Narrow Finetuning Leaves Clearly Readable Traces in Activation Differences Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We sh...

Huge thanks to my amazing co-authors @butanium.bsky.social, Stewart Slocum, Helena Casademunt, @cameronholmes.bsky.social, Robert West @neelnanda.bsky.social
Paper: www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.13900
(9/9)

Takeaways: ALWAYS mix in data when building model organisms that should serve as proxies for more naturally emerging behaviors. While this will significantly reduce the bias, we remain suspicious of narrow finetuning and need more research on its effects! (8/9)

A study of possible fixes shows that mixing in unrelated data during finetuning mostly removes the bias, but small factors remain. (7/9)

We further deep dive into why this happens by showing that the traces represent constant biases of the training data. Ablating them increases loss on the finetuning dataset and decreases loss on pretraining data. (6/9)

Our paper adds extended analysis with multiple agent models (no difference between GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro!) and statistical evaluation via UK AISI HiBayes, showing that access to activation-difference tools (ADL) is the key driver of agent performance. (5/9)

We then use interpretability agents to evaluate the claim that this information contains important insights into the finetuning objective - the agent with access to these tools significantly outperforms pure blackbox agents! (4/9)

Recap: We compute activation differences between a base and finetuned model on the first few tokens of unrelated text & inspect them with Patchscope and by steering the finetuned model with the differences. This reveals the semantics and structure of the finetuning data. (3/9)

Researchers often use narrowly finetuned models to practice: give them interesting properties and test their methods. It's key to use more realistic training schemes! We extend on our previous blogpost by providing more insights. (2/9) bsky.app/profile/jkmi...

New paper: Finetuning on narrow domains leaves traces behind. By looking at the difference in activations before and after finetuning, we can interpret what it was finetuned for. And so can our interpretability agent! 🧵

Narrow Finetuning Leaves Clearly Readable Traces in Activation Differences — AI Alignment Forum This is a preliminary research update. We are continuing our investigation and will publish a more in-depth analysis soon. The work was done as part…

Further research into these organisms is needed, although our preliminary investigations suggest that solutions may be straightforward. We will continue to work on this and provide a more detailed analysis soon.

Blogpost: www.alignmentforum.org/posts/sBSjEB... (8/8)

Takeaways: Narrow-finetuned “organisms” may poorly reflect broad, real-world training. They encode domain info that shows up even on unrelated inputs. (7/8)

Ablations: Mixing unrelated chat data or shrinking the finetune set weakens the signal—consistent with overfitting. (6/8)

Agent: The interpretability agent uses these signals to identify finetuning objectives with high accuracy by asking a few questions to the model to refine it’s hypothesis, outperforming black-box baselines. (5/8)

Result: Steering with these differences reproduces the finetuning data’s style and content on unrelated prompts. (4/8)

Result: Patchscope on these differences surfaces tokens tightly linked to the finetuning domain—no finetune data needed at inference. (3/8)

With @butanium.bsky.social @neelnanda.bsky.social Stewart Slocum
Setup: We compute per-position average activation differences between a base and finetuned model on unrelated text. Inspect with Patchscope and by steering the finetuned model with the differences. (2/8)

Can we interpret what happens in finetuning? Yes, if for a narrow domain! Narrow fine tuning leaves traces behind. By comparing activations before and after fine-tuning we can interpret these, even with an agent! We interpret subliminal learning, emergent misalignment, and more

Very cool initiative!

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08802

What does this mean? Causal Abstraction - while still a promising framework - must explicitly constrain representational structure or include the notion of generalization, since our proof hinges on the existence of an extremely overfitted function.
More detailed thread: bsky.app/profile/deni...

Our proofs show that, without assuming the linear representation hypothesis, any algorithm can be mapped onto any network. Experiments confirm this: e.g. by using highly non-linear representations we can map an Indirect-Object-Identification algorithm to randomly initialized language models.

Causal Abstraction, the theory behind DAS, tests if a network realizes a given algorithm. We show (w/ @denissutter.bsky.social, T. Hofmann, @tpimentel.bsky.social ) that the theory collapses without the linear representation hypothesis—a problem we call the non-linear representation dilemma.

The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability? The concept of causal abstraction got recently popularised to demystify the opaque decision-making processes of machine learning models; in short, a neural network can be abstracted as a higher-level ...

In this new paper, w/ @denissutter.bsky.social , @jkminder.bsky.social, and T.Hofmann, we study *causal abstraction*, a formal specification of when a deep neural network (DNN) implements an algorithm. This is the framework behind, e.g., distributed alignment search.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.08802

Paper title "The Non-Linear Representation Dilemma: Is Causal Abstraction Enough for Mechanistic Interpretability?" with the paper's graphical abstract showing how more powerful alignment maps between a DNN and an algorithm allow more complex features to be found and more "accurate" abstractions.

Mechanistic interpretability often relies on *interventions* to study how DNNs work. Are these interventions enough to guarantee the features we find are not spurious? No!⚠️ In our new paper, we show many mech int methods implicitly rely on the linear representation hypothesis🧵

Could this have caught OpenAI's sycophantic model update? Maybe!

Post: lesswrong.com/posts/xmpauE...

Paper Thread: bsky.app/profile/buta...

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2504.02922

Our methods reveal interpretable features related to e.g. refusal detection, fake facts, or information about the model's identity. This highlights that model diffing is a promising research direction deserving more attention.

By comparing base and chat models, we found that one of the main existing technique (crosscoders) hallucinates differences due to how its sparsity is enforced. We fixed this and also found that just training an SAE on (chat - base) activations works surprisingly well.

With @butanium.bsky.social and @neelnanda.bsky.social we've just published a post on model diffing that extends our previous paper.
Rather than trying to reverse-engineer the full fine-tuned model, model diffing focuses on understanding what makes it different from its base model internally.

In our most recent work, we looked at how to best leverage crosscoders to identify representational differences between base and chat models. We find many cool things, e.g., a knowledge boundary, a detailed info and a humor/ joke detection latent.

background: the technique here is "model-diffing" introduced by @anthropic.com just 8 weeks ago and quickly replicated by others. this includes an open source @hf.co model release by @butanium.bsky.social and @jkminder.bsky.social which I'm using. transformer-circuits.pub/2024/crossco...