Extensively evaluating the capabilities of (large) language models is difficult. Rapid development of state-of-the-art models induce benchmark saturation, while creating more challenging datasets is labor-intensive. Inspired by the recent developments in mechanistic interpretability, we introduce circuit stability as a new way to assess model performance. Circuit stability refers to a model’s ability to apply a consistent reasoning process–its circuit–across various inputs. We mathematically formalize circuit stability and circuit equivalence. Then, through three case studies, we empirically show that circuit stability and the lack thereof can characterize and predict different aspects of generalization. Our proposed methods offer a step towards rigorously relating the generality of models to their interpretability.

We present *knowledge continuity*, a novel definition inspired by Lipschitz continuity which aims to certify the robustness of neural networks across input domains (such as continuous and discrete domains in vision and language, respectively). Most existing approaches that seek to certify robustness, especially Lipschitz continuity, lie within the continuous domain with norm and distribution-dependent guarantees. In contrast, our proposed definition yields certification guarantees that depend only on the loss function and the intermediate learned metric spaces of the neural network. These bounds are independent of domain modality, norms, and distribution. We further demonstrate that the expressiveness of a model class is not at odds with its knowledge continuity. This implies that achieving robustness by maximizing knowledge continuity should not theoretically hinder inferential performance. Finally, to complement our theoretical results, we present several applications of knowledge continuity such as regularization, a certification algorithm, and show that knowledge continuity can be used to localize vulnerable components of a neural network.

Weicheng Ma, Henry Scheible, Brian Wang, Goutham Veeramachaneni, Pratim Chowdhary, Alan Sun, Andrew Koulogeorge, Lili Wang, Diyi Yang, Soroush Vosoughi. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.

Recent progress in deep neural networks has spurred significant development of image-based trash classification literature. These methods predominately use transfer learning to achieve state-of-the-art results. In this contribution, a new methodology is introduced that uses metadata fields such as location and time-based traffic intensity to assist existing image-based classifiers. We curated ISBNet, a dataset which contains 889 images and their associated metadata, distributed over 5 classes (paper, plastic, cans, tetra pak, and landfill). This dataset was used to develop our model, ThanosNet, which is superior to current state-of-the-art, image-based, trash classification models. Although ISBNet is localized to one user community, the general methodology developed here is applicable to a wide array of consumer contexts.