41 - Lee Sharkey on Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition

What's the next step forward in interpretability? In this episode, I chat with Lee Sharkey about his proposal for detecting computational mechanisms within neural networks: Attribution-based Parameter Decomposition, or APD for short.

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Transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2025/06/03/episode-41-lee-sharkey-attribution-based-parameter-decomposition.html

Topics we discuss, and timestamps:

0:00:41 APD basics

0:07:57 Faithfulness

0:11:10 Minimality

0:28:44 Simplicity

0:34:50 Concrete-ish examples of APD

0:52:00 Which parts of APD are canonical

0:58:10 Hyperparameter selection