Diego Caples (diego@activated-ai.com)

Rob Neuhaus (rob@activated-ai.com)

Introduction

In principle, neuron activations in a transformer-based language model residual stream should be about the same scale. In practice, however the dimensions unexpectedly widely vary in scale. Mathematical theories of the transformer architecture do not predict this. They expect rotational equivariance within a model, where one dimension is no more important than any other. Is there something wrong with our reasonably informed intuitions of how transformers work? What explains these outlier channels?

Previously, Anthropic researched the existence of these privileged basis dimensions (dimensions more important / larger than expected) and ruled out several causes. By elimination, they reached the hypothesis that per-channel normalization in the Adam optimizer was the cause of privileged basis. However, they did not prove this was the case.