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Sprint projectSep 17, 2024

nnsight transparent debugging

Aaron Kaufman, David Steinberg

Submitted to ARENA 4.0 Interpretability Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: nnsight transparent debugging

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We started this project with the intent of identifying a specific issue with nnsight debugging and submitting a pull request to fix it. We found a minimal test case where an IndexError within a nnsight run wasn’t correctly propagated to the user, making debugging difficult, and wrote up a proposal for some pull requests to fix it. However, after posting the proposal in the discord, we discovered this page in their GitHub (https://github.com/ndif-team/nnsight/blob/2f41eddb14bf3557e02b4322a759c90930250f51/NNsight_Walkthrough.ipynb#L801, ctrl-f “validate”) which addresses the problem. We replicated their solution here (https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1WZNeDQ2zXbP4i2bm7xgC0nhK_1h904RB?usp=sharing) and got a helpful stack trace for the error, including the error type and (several stack layers up) the line causing it.

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Cite this project

@misc{kaufman2024nnsight,
  title = {{nnsight transparent debugging}},
  author = {Aaron Kaufman and David Steinberg},
  year = {2024},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to ARENA 4.0 Interpretability Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/nnsight-transparent-debugging}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/nnsight-transparent-debugging}
}

Build something like this at the next Sprint

AI Collusion Research Sprint · Oct 23 - 25, 2026