Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by theptip on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:31PM
(#50347259)
Yeah, I think the multiple experiments muddy the water.
Early experiments show one-shotting direct weight interp, which is crazy to me. But this is IIUC only on early layers.
The later math result gave the LLM the ability to run forward passes and inspect activations, and as others have noted is more of a classic steering vector intervention. Impressive how low to the metal this one was, but it’s a lot less so than the openers. Plus, as you say this is just bugfixing a known flaw of repetition, by finding the “repetition direction” and top triggering neurons, then rewiring the neurons to fire suppressing repetition instead. This is not a new technique and doesn’t shed any mechanistic understanding on how maths works.
Early experiments show one-shotting direct weight interp, which is crazy to me. But this is IIUC only on early layers.
The later math result gave the LLM the ability to run forward passes and inspect activations, and as others have noted is more of a classic steering vector intervention. Impressive how low to the metal this one was, but it’s a lot less so than the openers. Plus, as you say this is just bugfixing a known flaw of repetition, by finding the “repetition direction” and top triggering neurons, then rewiring the neurons to fire suppressing repetition instead. This is not a new technique and doesn’t shed any mechanistic understanding on how maths works.