Matt Levinson

In my previous post, I explored the distributional properties of transformer activations, finding that they follow mixture distributions dominated by logistic-like or even heavier tailed primary components with minor modes in the tails and sometimes in the shoulders. Note that I have entirely ignored dimension here, treating each value in...

In January 2023, beren and Eric Winsor cataloged basic distributional properties of weights, activations, and gradients in GPT-2 models, providing a systematic view of model internals (thanks to Ryan Greenblatt for the pointer). This post extends their investigation in two directions. First, examining their characterization of transformer activations as "nearly...