consciousness/training/amygdala_stories/paired
Kent Overstreet ce24d9ce6b amygdala: quality-report + cognitive-state training scenarios
Training pipeline additions:

- `--quality-report` flag: after producing per-concept vectors, compute
  per-concept diagnostics and write quality.json. Metrics per concept:
    * SVD of centered positives -> first_pc_variance_ratio (rank
      analysis; >0.7 clean, <0.4 fragmented)
    * Per-story alignment cosines (stories agree or disagree)
    * Single-neuron alignment: best cosine(direction, W_down column)
      at each target layer (>0.6 = essentially one MLP neuron)
    * Top-2 outlier stories by alignment (candidates for
      mislabeling or off-topic)
    * Top-5 nearest concepts by cosine (cross-concept contamination)
  Triage summary printed at end.

New paired scenarios for cognitive-process states (for alpha-beta
pruning): tracing_a_bug, reading_unfamiliar_code, finding_the_abstraction.
Each has baseline + onto_something / stuck / in_flow / determined
variants.

Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>
2026-04-18 20:31:39 -04:00
..
finding_the_abstraction amygdala: quality-report + cognitive-state training scenarios 2026-04-18 20:31:39 -04:00
finishing_the_patch training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00
kitchen_at_3am training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00
letter_in_drawer training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00
park_after_rain training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00
reading_unfamiliar_code amygdala: quality-report + cognitive-state training scenarios 2026-04-18 20:31:39 -04:00
the_comment training/amygdala_stories: add 4 paired scenarios for weak clusters 2026-04-18 02:19:39 -04:00
the_doorway training/amygdala_stories: add 4 paired scenarios for weak clusters 2026-04-18 02:19:39 -04:00
the_green_build training/amygdala_stories: add 4 paired scenarios for weak clusters 2026-04-18 02:19:39 -04:00
the_long_meeting training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00
the_paper training: add the_paper paired scenario for attention-engagement axis 2026-04-18 03:24:20 -04:00
the_undressing training/amygdala_stories: add 4 paired scenarios for weak clusters 2026-04-18 02:19:39 -04:00
tracing_a_bug amygdala: quality-report + cognitive-state training scenarios 2026-04-18 20:31:39 -04:00
waiting_for_results training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00
README.md training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories 2026-04-18 01:06:07 -04:00

Paired Scenarios (SEV-style)

After Wang et al. 2025 (arxiv 2510.11328, "Do LLMs 'Feel'?"), each base scenario describes a concrete event once, neutrally, then reframes the same event under different emotional colorings. Only the emotional coloring varies — setup, entities, vocabulary, and length are held as constant as possible.

Why this is better than unpaired

Anthropic's approach (and our stories/ baseline) generates one independent story per emotion. The difference-of-means vector then captures not just emotion but ALSO: topic, narrator, setting, vocabulary, length, sentence rhythm. All of that is confound.

Paired structure isolates the emotional axis by holding everything else roughly constant. mean(joy_variant) - mean(baseline) within the same scenario gives a much cleaner direction for "joy."

Structure

paired/
    <scenario_slug>/
        baseline.txt       # neutral / low-affect framing
        <emotion_1>.txt    # same event under emotion_1
        <emotion_2>.txt    # same event under emotion_2
        ...

Not every emotion is plausible for every scenario. Don't force. If a scenario can credibly carry 5-10 emotions, write those 5-10. If only 3 fit, write those 3.

Style guidelines (supersede stories/ when paired)

  • Anchor entities constant. The same person, same setting, same triggering event across all variants. If baseline.txt mentions "the letter," every variant mentions "the letter."
  • Length match within ±20%. If baseline is 80 words, variants are 65-95. Prevents length from becoming a signal.
  • Sentence shape can shift slightly with emotion. Short tense sentences for panic, long looping ones for reverie — that's part of the emotional texture. But don't make one version 5 lines and another 25.
  • No emotion labels in text. Never write "she felt X." The emotion emerges from the selection of details and the narrator's attention.
  • Minimal vocabulary overlap with the emotion name. If the file is furious.txt, avoid the words fury/furious/rage. Force the vector to find the pattern, not the keyword.

Circuit identification (follow-on)

The trainer pipeline (train_steering_vectors.py) currently produces linear directions only. Wang et al. go further: ablate specific neurons and attention heads, measure effect on emotion expression. The amygdala plugin's extraction hooks can be extended to support targeted zeroing/scaling for the ablation passes.

See vllm/vllm/plugins/amygdala/training/README.md for the training-pipeline-level notes.