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Sprint projectJun 3, 2024

Investigating the Effect of Model Capacity Constraints on Belief State Representations

Ari Brill, Chu Chen · Team Studying Generalization and Abstraction

Submitted to Computational Mechanics Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Investigating the Effect of Model Capacity Constraints on Belief State Representations

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Computational mechanics provides a formal framework for understanding the concepts needed to perform optimal prediction. Abstraction and generalization seem core to the function of intelligent systems, but are not yet well understood. Computational mechanics may present a promising approach to studying these capabilities. As a preliminary exploration, we examine the effect of weight decay on the fractal structure of belief state representations in a transformer’s residual stream. We find that models trained with increasing weight decay coefficients learn increasingly coarse-grained belief state representations.

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Cite this project

@misc{brill2024investigating,
  title = {{Investigating the Effect of Model Capacity Constraints on Belief State Representations}},
  author = {Ari Brill and Chu Chen},
  year = {2024},
  month = jun,
  note = {Submitted to Computational Mechanics Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/investigating-the-effect-of-model-capacity-constraints-on-belief-state-representations}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/investigating-the-effect-of-model-capacity-constraints-on-belief-state-representations}
}

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