Calibrated concept profiles: making the reading of a model's neurons a measurement

Piotr Wilam

Interpretability has largely moved from reading a model's neurons directly to reading a second model trained on the first: a probe, a sparse autoencoder, a crosscoder. The move answered real faults -- mixed meanings, thresholds without a unit, readings that did not transfer from one study to the next -- but gave up what a direct reading alone provides: nothing trained in between, the neurons themselves named, and a reading that can be repeated and compared. Here the direct reading is made a measurement. A neuron's activation varies with the prompt, so its reading is a distribution over a population of stimuli. We declare that population: every factor around a target construct is drawn at its rate in a reference corpus and logged. From the declared distribution we generate a battery of prompts, and draw it twice. From the battery we compute the calibrated concept profile, one number per neuron, stated in units of the neuron's own spread on ordinary input; the two draws give every number a noise unit. Before the profile is read, a fixed set of checks licenses the battery on the model, and the smallest change the profile can resolve across training checkpoints is measured. Realised…