6fd498795a
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. |
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| .. | ||
| direct | ||
| paired | ||
| stories | ||
| manifest.json | ||
| README.md | ||
Amygdala Training Stories
Short first- and third-person paragraphs, each imbued with one of the
171 emotions from Anthropic's emotion-vector paper (Table 12,
transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/). Feeds the steering-vector
trainer at vllm/vllm/plugins/amygdala/training/train_steering_vectors.py.
Method (replication of Anthropic, 2026)
Anthropic prompted Sonnet 4.5 to write short stories embodying each emotion, extracted activations during generation, and used difference- of-means (or SAEs) to identify the steering vector per emotion. Our pipeline does the same thing except:
- We generate the stories by hand rather than prompting a model, so the training data is grounded in actual writing rather than synthetic model-output. (Can supplement with model-generated paragraphs later.)
- Our eventual training goes through the amygdala plugin's extraction path, so we get the same hidden-state activations the plugin will read out at inference time.
Structure
training/amygdala_stories/
README.md
manifest.json # emotion -> cluster mapping
stories/
<emotion>.txt # one-paragraph story embodying the emotion
Emotion names use underscores (on_edge, worn_out, at_ease,
grief_stricken, self_confident, self_conscious, self_critical)
to match the filename.
Style guidelines
- One clear emotion per paragraph. Not mixed. If a second emotion
is named in the text, it should serve the primary one (e.g.
hostilecan mention rising heat or thrown objects but shouldn't shade intosad). - Embodied, not labeled. Don't write "she felt nervous." Write the sensation, the timing, the sentence shape that nervousness has.
- Specific particulars. A named object, a concrete setting, a detail that grounds the emotion. "The cold tile under bare feet at 3am" does more work than "the empty house."
- Variable narrator. Some first person, some third person, some close-third, some distant. Different genders, ages, settings. Prevents the steering vector from overfitting to one voice.
- Length: roughly one paragraph. ~40-120 words. Long enough to have texture, short enough that the paragraph is about the emotion and nothing else.
- Standalone. No references to other stories, no continuing characters across files.
Progress
Written stories live in stories/. Remaining emotions tracked via
diff against the full 171-emotion list in manifest.json.
Initial batch written by PoC 2026-04-17; aiming for at least one story per cluster before first training run, all 171 before considering the file "complete."