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For many large models, semantically meaningful directions align with individual neurons.
“Serendipitously, it turns out that for many large models, semantically meaningful directions align with individual neurons.”
From Mechanistic interpretability for steering vision-language-action models (2025) · cites this paper as [9]
In “Interaction between Neurons” (no page number), the paper describes individual neurons as basis directions and says those directions seem interpretable more often than random directions. It does not establish this for “many large models,” and it cautions that random directions can also be meaningful and neurons may not be the right semantic units. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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- Authors
- Olah, C., Mordvintsev, A., & Schubert, L.
- Affiliations
- Google (United States) (US)
- Venue
- Distill
- Publisher
- Distill Working Group
- Published
- 2017-11-07
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 11
- ISSN
- 2476-0757 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4229494842
- Cited by
- 880
- References
- 11
- Citations by year
- 2026: 66 · 2025: 104 · 2024: 105 · 2023: 137 · 2022: 133 · 2021: 120 · 2020: 104 · 2019: 68 · 2018: 41 · 2017: 2
- FWCI
- 35.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Distill (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Data Visualization and Analytics
- Keywords
- feature visualization, neural network interpretability, activation maps, model explainability
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