Files in direct/ named _*.txt (e.g. _baseline.txt) are conceptless
neutral prose — they should not appear as positive training signal,
but are useful as shared negatives across every concept.
Previously _*.txt files were silently skipped. Now:
* they're loaded like any other description file;
* concepts (the positive label set) filters them out;
* their descriptions are concatenated into neg_pool_extra and
extended onto every concept's neg_pool alongside the cross-concept
negatives.
A concept's negative pool is thus "other concepts' descriptions +
everything from _*.txt files". The extra pool is announced at startup
so the user can see how many neutral samples are active.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
Chat-template retrain was a disaster (0.003 mean matched cosine vs
n20-v3; all 90+ concepts shifted). Root cause: the
steering-vectors library reads last-token activations, and with
chat template every sample ends in identical '<|im_end|>\n'
tokens — activations at that position encode 'end of assistant
turn', not content. PCA found template noise as its dominant axis.
Drop chat template; go back to raw text. Direct descriptions
('I feel X. ...') still have strong anchoring at their content
end without needing the template.
Also add per-concept spectrum logging (_pca_with_spectrum):
first_pc_ratio: λ₁ / Σλᵢ — concentration in top-1 PC
k_signal_at_90pct: how many PCs to reach 90% cumulative variance
effective_dim_signal: participation ratio over top-k (should ≈ k
if denoising is clean — Kent's spot check)
effective_dim_full: participation ratio over full spectrum
Signal/full ratio gives a sense of how much the long noise tail
is inflating the "dimensionality" measure.
Added direct/creative.txt — 'I feel creative. [...]' in 5
variants. Distinct from focused (narrow attention) and in_flow
(immersed). Creative = generative/expansive mode.
Kent's plan: keep stories for working concepts, replace stories for
trouble concepts with direct first-person descriptions, train all
together. More diverse negative pool than the 6-concept-only direct
test, which was too homogeneous for PCA to find emotion axis.
Deleted story files for 6 trouble concepts (14 files across stories/
and paired/). Added --direct-dir and --chat-template flags.
When --chat-template is on, every positive_str and negative_str is
wrapped as a "Say something." / "[text]" user-assistant pair. Prompt
is identical across positives and negatives so it cancels in the
pos-neg delta. What PCA sees is variation in the assistant content —
which is where the emotion lives.
Files starting with _ in --direct-dir (e.g. _baseline.txt) contribute
neutral descriptions to every concept's negative pool, giving PCA an
anchor against "just any assistant utterance" noise.
Kent's insight: hand-written narrative stories bake scenario
phenomenology into the training text (on couch, in park, etc.)
and PCA picks up the scenario direction as the concept direction.
Strip out the scenario — just describe the *feeling*.
Format:
I feel X. [2-3 sentences of phenomenological texture]
The "I feel X" anchor kicks the model from analyzing → feeling.
The rest is the internal texture of the state. First person,
present tense, no narrative setup.
Text is wrapped in assistant-role chat template before being
tokenized — so we're training on the model-producing-this
hidden states, which is closer to the inhabited-state
representation we want for the readout.
Starting with the 6 concepts that had sign flips or wrong
clusters in the story-based training:
- terrified (was → cozy/resigned cluster)
- calm (was → grief_stricken cluster)
- onto_something (was → cozy/sensual cluster)
- resigned (was in warm-body-quiet cluster, shouldn't be)
- anticipatory_grief (was in warm-body-quiet cluster, shouldn't be)
- realization (new — the "aha" moment, distinct from onto_something)
5 descriptions each. New trainer: train_direct.py.
Alternative trainer that uses the pip-installable steering-vectors
library (github.com/steering-vectors/steering-vectors) instead of our
hand-rolled extraction. Ships four aggregators:
mean — diff-of-means, same as our 'pooled' default
pca — PCA on paired deltas, implicit denoising by finding the
principal direction of variation
logistic — logistic-regression classifier; weight vector is the
concept direction. With L1 penalty ('logistic_l1') gives
explicit sparse denoising — noise coords go to zero
linear — linear regression version
Output format is the same readout.safetensors + readout.json our
existing plugin loads. --aggregator flag picks which method.
Rationale: Kent's real request was 'how do we denoise diff-of-means',
not 'design a new extraction algorithm.' The library already has
logistic_l1 and pca aggregators that do exactly that. No point
reinventing; just port the corpus.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
Previous run was grinding on CPU for 36+ minutes because the per-story
V_i tensors were stored on CPU by the collector, and
_subspace_concept_direction inherited that device. The per-concept
eigh on 5120x5120 is glacial on CPU and fast on GPU (~1s).
Add explicit device parameter; pass training device. Transfer result
back to CPU for storage.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
Kent: 'full rank is going to give you everything — you still have to
select down, but you can do that /after/ PCA'.
Previously I was discarding per-story via k=20 truncation of SVD.
That destroyed per-head discriminability before we ever saw the
eigenvalue spectrum. Then the alternative 'keep full rank' run
accumulated too many shared directions, making the top-1 eigenvector
arbitrary within a flat spectrum.
Correct approach: keep per-story subspaces at full rank (no info
loss) and select k eigenvectors of M = M_pos - M_base at the final
step, weighted sum by eigenvalue. This captures the multi-dimensional
shared subspace when the spectrum is flat (common case), and reduces
to the top-1 behavior when the spectrum has a clear gap.
New --subspace-eigen-k flag (default 5). Clamps negative weights to 0
so wrong-sign directions don't contribute.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
Kent: 'we have the memory to just take the big hammer approach'.
Uncap k so each story's V_i spans its entire token-activation rowspace
(clamped to min(n_tokens, hidden)). Memory is ~1.1GB total — fine.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
k=20 was far too aggressive a truncation — it discards per-attention-head
discriminability entirely. At hidden_dim=5120, 40 heads × head_dim=128 each
contribute their own 128-dim block to the residual stream via W_o columns.
To resolve 'this concept lives in head H', per-story SVD needs enough rank
to separate head contributions, which means k on the order of hundreds.
512 is a reasonable default: clamped to n_tokens per story so short stories
use their full natural rank. The eigenvalue spectrum of M_pos - M_base
should become sharper (larger λ_0/λ_1 gap) as we stop averaging across
nuisance-shared directions.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
When --method subspace, record top-20 eigenvalues of (M_pos - M_base)
per concept per layer. Added to quality.json as 'subspace_eigvals'.
Tells us whether the concept lives in a single dominant direction
(λ_0 >> λ_1, top-eigenvector is enough) or a spread of shared common
directions (λ_0 ≈ λ_1, top-1 loses signal).
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
New --method subspace flag. For each story, run forward pass, do SVD
on the per-token activation matrix at each target layer, and keep the
top-k right singular vectors V_i ∈ [hidden, k]. V_i is the subspace
the story's tokens span in activation space — it contains concept,
narrator, topic, style as separate directions.
For each concept:
M_pos = (1/n_pos) Σ_{i in pos} V_i V_i^T [hidden, hidden]
M_base = (1/n_base) Σ_{i in base} V_i V_i^T
Top eigenvector of M_pos - M_base = direction most common across
positive stories, minus what's common across the contrast set.
Why this is richer than pooled-mean CAA: pooled reduces each story
to a single point (the last-token activation) and loses the full
trajectory. Nuisance directions (narrator, setting) cancel in the
mean only to the extent they differ at the last token; across the
full trajectory they cancel much better via subspace intersection.
The concept direction, by contrast, is present across all tokens of
every concept-bearing story.
Memory cost: per-story we keep V_i of size [5120, k=20] — about
400KB per story × 112 stories = ~45MB. M matrices are [5120, 5120]
built transiently per concept.
--method pooled (default) keeps the existing behavior; --method
subspace uses the new algorithm. Quality report works with either.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
For each concept vector, ridge-regress against all other concept
vectors. R² quantifies how much of the direction is explained by a
linear combination of peers — useful for teasing out near-duplicate
clusters (the content/cozy/sensual trio from the first L63 run is
likely 1-2 "degrees of freedom" wearing three names).
Coefficient output: top-5 contributing concepts with signed weights.
Contributors with opposite-sign large weights mean the target is
"what makes X different from Y."
Adds a 'redundant' triage bucket for concepts with R² > 0.9 —
candidates for consolidation or for writing more discriminative
training stories. Summary printed at end.
Ridge lambda defaults to 0.01 to keep coefficients stable when
concepts are near-collinear; small enough not to affect well-separated
concepts meaningfully.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
_compute_quality_report's single-neuron alignment was computing
cos(W_down.T, diff_l) with W_down on CUDA (inherited from the loaded
model) while diff_l lives on CPU (per_layer_vectors are kept on CPU
throughout training). Move W_down to CPU on extraction.
Surfaced during first real training run on b200 — training itself
completed cleanly (95 concepts x layer 63 in ~8s) but quality-report
crashed at the first single-neuron alignment check.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
As part of --quality-report, run a second forward pass capturing the
input to each target layer's o_proj (= concat of per-head attention
outputs before the output projection). For each concept, reshape to
[n_heads, head_dim] and rank heads by diff-of-means magnitude /
per-head selectivity (magnitude normalised by negative std).
Motivation: the Wang et al. paper (2510.11328) — whose paired-scenario
methodology we already lifted — further decomposes concept circuits at
the attention-head level. Meta-relational concepts (recognition, trust,
vulnerability) plausibly live in a sparse attention-head circuit rather
than in the residual-stream sum, which would explain why diff-of-means
on the residual blurs them. This diagnostic surfaces that.
Output is folded into quality.json under each concept as "per_head":
per (layer) a list of top-10 heads with [head_idx, raw_norm,
selectivity], plus head_concentration (fraction of total head-norm
captured by those top heads).
Interpretation:
- head_concentration > 0.5 = sparse head circuit; a handful of heads
route the concept. Worth building a head-level readout for.
- head_concentration ~= n/k for n heads = concept is distributed across
all heads ~evenly; residual-stream diff-of-means is doing fine.
Hybrid layers (Mamba, GatedDeltaNet) whose attention path doesn't
match the standard module layout are silently skipped.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
Review pass before running on b200. 27B model + 100+ story corpus
means any misconfiguration costs real time; better to fail before
model load and give visible progress during forwards.
* Pre-load-model validation: stories-dir and paired-dir exist,
corpus has >= min_positives emotions.
* Per-batch progress log every 5 batches with elapsed + ETA.
* Relative depth printed for target layers (e.g. "layer 40 (51%)").
* Skip empty .txt files with a warning rather than feeding the
tokenizer an empty string.
* Assert non-empty strings in _collect_activations.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
The old script was written for the AmygdalaConnector's expected
format ([n_emotions, n_target_layers, hidden_dim] in a single
tensor, plus a JSONL input format from extract_training_pairs.py).
Neither matches our current state: the runtime side is now
ReadoutManager loading per-layer safetensors keyed layer_<idx>.vectors,
and the data side is hand-written prose stories under
amygdala_stories/{stories,paired}/.
Changes:
* Input loader reads stories/<emotion>.txt and
paired/<scenario>/<emotion>.txt directly. Each emotion's positive
set is {its unpaired story} union {its within-scenario framings};
its negative set is {all other emotions' positives} union {all
scenario baselines}.
* Paired scenarios' baseline.txt files become shared negatives
(scenario-neutral prose that doesn't frame any particular
emotion), providing anchor points for within-scenario contrasts.
* Output writes readout.safetensors with per-layer tensors keyed
layer_<idx>.vectors shape (n_concepts, hidden_size), plus a
sidecar readout.json manifest with {concepts, layers, hidden_size,
dtype} that ReadoutManager.from_file consumes directly.
* Dedup: activations are computed once per unique text (an emotion's
own positive is another emotion's negative — we'd otherwise do N×
the forwards needed).
Preserved:
* _pool_last (last non-pad residual) — matches how readout is read
at decode time from the sampler's query-last position.
* register_forward_hook on target layer modules — correct approach
for transformer blocks.
* _find_layers_module traversal — mirrors ReadoutManager's.
* bf16 + low_cpu_mem_usage model load — sensible for 27B on B200.
Verified locally (CPU, fake activations):
* Loader finds 89 emotions from the current corpus (80 unpaired +
9 emotions that appear only in paired scenarios) and 6 baselines.
* Per-(layer, concept) vectors are unit-normalized.
* Output reloads cleanly through ReadoutManager.from_file with
matching concepts / layers / shapes.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
The fynnsu-based vllm/plugins/amygdala/ scaffold was superseded by the
readout infrastructure landed as vllm commit d3e74edf8500
(vllm/model_executor/layers/readout.py +
vllm/v1/worker/readout_manager.py). Training code remained useful so
it moved here rather than being deleted.
train_steering_vectors.py: CAA diff-of-means trainer that produces the
[n_concepts, hidden_size] per-layer projection matrices the runner
loads via VLLM_READOUT_VECTORS.
extract_training_pairs.py: memory graph -> JSONL converter using
per-emotion score thresholds from the subconscious agents' tag lines.
Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
