Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to Sandhini Agarwal, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei,
Tom Brown, Jeff Clune, Steve Dowling, Gretchen Krueger, Brice Menard,
Reiichiro Nakano, Aditya Ramesh, Pranav Shyam, Ilya Sutskever and Martin
Wattenberg.
Author Contributions
Gabriel Goh: Research lead. Gabriel Goh first discovered multimodal
neurons, sketched out the project direction and paper outline, and did
much of the conceptual and engineering work that allowed the team to
investigate the models in a scalable way. This included developing tools
for understanding how concepts were built up and decomposed (that were
applied to emotion neurons), developing zero-shot neuron search (that
allowed easy discoverability of neurons), and working with Michael Petrov
on porting CLIP to microscope. Subsequently developed faceted feature
visualization, and text feature visualization.
Chris Olah: Worked with Gabe on the overall framing of the article,
actively mentored each member of the team through their work providing
both high and low level contributions to their sections, and contributed
to the text of much of the article, setting the stylistic tone. He worked
with Gabe on understanding the neuroscience literature and better
understanding the relevant neuroscience literature. Additionally, he wrote
the sections on region neurons and developed diversity feature
visualization which Gabe used to create faceted feature visualization
Alec Radford: Developed CLIP. First observed that CLIP was learning
to read. Advised Gabriel Goh on project direction on a weekly basis. Upon
the discovery that CLIP was using text to classify images, proposed
typographical adversarial attacks as a promising research direction.
Shan Carter: Worked on initial investigation of CLIP with Gabriel
Goh. Did multimodal activation atlases to understand the space of
multimodal representations and geometry, and neuron atlases, which
potentially helped the arrangement and display of neurons. Provided much
useful advice on the visual presentation of ideas, and helped with many
aspects of visual design.
Michael Petrov: Worked on the initial investigation of multimodal
neurons by implementing and scaling dataset examples. Discovered, with
Gabriel Goh, the original “Spider-Man” multimodal neuron in the dataset
examples, and many more multimodal neurons. Assisted a lot in the
engineering of Microscope both early on, and at the end, including helping
Gabriel Goh with the difficult technical challenges of porting microscope
to a different backend.
Chelsea Voss†: Performed investigation of the typographical attacks
phenomena, both via linear probes and zero-shot, confirming that the
attacks were indeed real and state of the art. Proposed and successfully
found “in-the-wild” attacks in the zero-shot classifier. Subsequently
wrote the section “typographical attacks”. Upon completion of this part of
the project, investigated responses of neurons to rendered text on
dictionary words. Also assisted with the organization of neurons into
neuron cards.
Nick Cammarata†: Drew the connection between multimodal neurons in
neural networks and multimodal neurons in the brain, which became the
overall framing of the article. Created the conditional probability plots
(regional, Trump, mental health), labeling more than 1500 images,
discovered that negative pre-ReLU activations are often interpretable, and
discovered that neurons sometimes contain a distinct regime change between
medium and strong activations. Wrote the identity section and the emotion
sections, building off Gabriel’s discovery of emotion neurons and
discovering that “complex” emotions can be broken down into simpler ones.
Edited the overall text of the article and built infrastructure allowing
the team to collaborate in Markdown with embeddable components.
Ludwig Schubert: Helped with general infrastructure.
† equal contributors
Discussion and Review
Review 1 – Anonymous
Review 2 – Anonymous
Review 3 – Anonymous
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Citation
For attribution in academic contexts, please cite this work as
Goh, et al., "Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks", Distill, 2021.
BibTeX citation
@article{goh2021multimodal,
author = {Goh, Gabriel and †, Nick Cammarata and †, Chelsea Voss and Carter, Shan and Petrov, Michael and Schubert, Ludwig and Radford, Alec and Olah, Chris},
title = {Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks},
journal = {Distill},
year = {2021},
note = {
doi = {10.23915/distill.00030}
}
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