Mar 10, 2025
Attention Pattern Based Information Flow Visualization Tool
Sofia Maria Lo Cicero Vaina, Anastasiia Ivanova, Liubov Yaronskaya
Summary
Understanding information flow in transformer-based language models is crucial for mechanistic interpretability. We introduce a visualization tool that extracts and represents attention patterns across model components, revealing how tokens influence each other during processing. Our tool automatically identifies and color-codes functional attention head types based on established taxonomies from recent research on indirect object identification (Wang et al., 2022), factual recall (Chughtai et al., 2024), and factual association retrieval (Geva et al., 2023). This interactive approach enables researchers to trace information propagation through transformer architectures, providing deeper insights into how these models implement reasoning and knowledge retrieval capabilities.
Cite this work:
@misc {
title={
Attention Pattern Based Information Flow Visualization Tool
},
author={
Sofia Maria Lo Cicero Vaina, Anastasiia Ivanova, Liubov Yaronskaya
},
date={
3/10/25
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}