🚨 New paper: Some, but not all, AI companies make corporately-loyal models. xAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, & OpenAI models all downplay company controversies. Google, Meta, & Alibaba models don't. The findings are clear, but we are pretty confused as to why... 🧵 @finke.dev
Sonia
@soniajoseph.bsky.social
AI researcher at Mila, visiting researcher at Meta Also on X: @soniajoseph_
It was a pleasure to be interviewed about world model interpretability, physical intelligence, and robot security by Paige Harriman @climatepaige.bsky.social. It takes skill to lead an interview that everyone from technical researchers to laymen can enjoy and understand! 🤖 tinyurl.com/ycypkmjf
It has been extremely disorienting traveling between the tech right in SF and the academic left in Montreal and has induced a somewhat deep sense of moral relativism.
Half the people who say you don’t need to go to grad school to do AI research have been to grad school
We visualized thousands of CLIP SAE features in collaboration between @fraunhoferhhi.bsky.social and @mila-quebec.bsky.social! Search thousands of interpretable CLIP features in our vision atlas, with autointerp labels and scores like clarity and polysemanticity. Link: tinyurl.com/3ffy8xk6
I’m really excited about Diffusion Steering Lens, an intuitive and elegant new “logit lens” technique for decoding the attention and MLP blocks of vision transformers! Vision is much more expressive than language, so some new mech interp rules apply:
🔍Logit Lens tracks what transformer LMs “believe” at each layer. How can we effectively adapt this approach to Vision Transformers? Happy to share our “Decoding Vision Transformers: the Diffusion Steering Lens” was accepted at the CVPR 2025 Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability for Vision! (1/7)
A genuine question for the death by 2027 people: China authors 30% of top papers, is winning in video zero shot retrieval with InternVideo2, & has crazy centralization of data and infra. The CCP is not stupid. What does it mean, if they have no plans for doom within 2 yrs?
AI research is famously autistic— but autism in women can look different: intense daydreaming, an obsession with celebrities, or a fixation with female-coded activities like makeup/beauty. It’s socially masked and not visible to the untrained eye.
Looking forward to being a speaker at the first mechanistic interpretability workshop for vision at CVPR! 🔥 sites.google.com/view/miv-cvp... Paper submission deadline March 1st
Leaving a digital trail, just in case, given there is speculation of foul play currently in the Valley. I am happy and healthy and intend to live a long and beautiful life. If anything were to happen to me, that would be highly suspicious and should be investigated.
I’ve been giving some context on AI development environments here, particularly how co-living and tribal bonds among researchers in Silicon Valley influence ethical decisions, whistleblowing, and the trajectory of AGI development. x.com/soniajoseph_...
x.com
x.com
I’ll be tweeting out something important this weekend that has been happening in the shadows of the AI industry.
Excited to release what we’ve been working on at Amaranth Foundation, our latest whitepaper, NeuroAI for AI safety! A detailed, ambitious roadmap for how neuroscience research can help build safer AI systems while accelerating both virtual neuroscience and neurotech. 1/N
How to drive your research forward? “I tested the idea we discussed last time. Here are some results. It does not work. (… awkward silence)” Such conversations happen so many times when meetings with students. How do we move forward? You need …
I returned to Boston for Thanksgiving, my birthday, and my grandmother’s funeral. She passed down to me a necklace from Kerala, and a vast collection of British and Indo-Anglian literature. Death, while tragic, can be re-energizing in reminding you who you are.
congratulations, @ian-goodfellow.bsky.social, for the test-of-time award at @neuripsconf.bsky.social! this award reminds me of how GAN started with this one email ian sent to the Mila (then Lisa) lab mailing list in May 2014. super insightful and amazing execution!
Where are my Bluesky followers coming from? How are you finding me?
I wrote a post on multimodal interpretability techniques, including sparse feature circuit discovery, exploiting the shared text-image space of CLIP, and training adapters. soniajoseph.ai/multimodal-i... 💜
Multimodal interpretability in 2024
Multimodal interpretability, from sparse feature circuits with SAEs, to vision transformers leveraging CLIP's shared text-image space.
soniajoseph.ai
It took me years to build a following and community on X. I’m very curious what will happen on Bluesky.
It's wild how much of an influence Canada has had on neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning. Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio... Is there a book or article about this?
@soniajoseph.bsky.social has been doing fascinating work on mechanistic interpretability in multi-modal models. It's like neuroscience for AI! If this kind of stuff interests you I strongly recommend reading this blog post. #MLSky #AI #NeuroAI 🧪
I wrote a post on multimodal interpretability techniques, including sparse feature circuit discovery, exploiting the shared text-image space of CLIP, and training adapters. soniajoseph.ai/multimodal-i... 💜
I wrote a post on multimodal interpretability techniques, including sparse feature circuit discovery, exploiting the shared text-image space of CLIP, and training adapters. soniajoseph.ai/multimodal-i... 💜
Multimodal interpretability in 2024
Multimodal interpretability, from sparse feature circuits with SAEs, to vision transformers leveraging CLIP's shared text-image space.
soniajoseph.ai