Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by yurimo on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:18PM
(#50348007)
Scale is an interesting point here. Large overparametrized networks don't behave in the same way as mall toy models, this is one of the big caveats of many interp works. I expect naked weight edit will not work for large models. Why? Because an agents needs to know what it edits and reason on it. You could theoretically improve a model on some form of weight recognition, maybe it will work maybe it won't. But again, we come up against a cost/benefit dilemma, it sounds exotic and sci-fi but likely impractical. Parameters of model are connected and relate to each other. Instead, current SOTA auto-interp argues that what we need are better tools for models to know themselves, so rather than direct edit we need to give models better understanding of large parameter geometries, then they can work at scale. This is much harder to do than applying a steering vector.
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Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by cft on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:07AM
(#50348980)
I copied your text into Astra and asked to guess your native language:
Russian native speaker, with approximately C2-level English proficiency. I am now about 85% confident that English is not his native language, and 35% sure that Russian is his first language.
Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by ale42 on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:26AM
(#50349476)
And? What's the point here?
Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by irthomasthomas on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:44AM
(#50349946)
I think its a meta comment about LLMs overconfidence. Like, htf does Astra, the big frontier model, still hallucinate confidence scores like this? Reliability and interpretability are still over the horizon.
Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by pyrale on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:09AM
(#50350085)
> I expect naked weight edit will not work for large models. Why? Because an agent needs to know what it edits and reason on it.
Would that still be true for MoE models where only a small part is activated on a specific topic?
Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen
by chemicalnovae on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:46AM
(#50350328)
I think _small_ is still doing a lot of work here. Yes, an MoE model doesn't "use" all of it's weights at once _but_ what it does use is still a hell of a lot heavier than the 20K toy shown in the paper.