Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Recorded 02 September 2026. Michael Winer of The Alignment Research Center presents "Mechanistic Understanding of Multilayer Perceptrons" at IPAM's Foundations of Interpretability Workshop.
Abstract: By far the most common way to estimate an expected loss in machine learning is to draw samples, compute the loss on each one, and take the empirical average. However, sampling is not necessarily optimal. Given an MLP at initialization, we show how to estimate its expected output without running samples through the network at all. Instead, we produce approximate representations of the distributions of activations at each layer, leveraging tools such as cumulants and Hermite expansions. For sufficiently wide networks, our estimator achieves a target mean squared error using substantially fewer FLOPs than Monte Carlo sampling. We find moreover that our methods perform particularly well at estimating the probabilities of rare events. Finally, our methods pass various qualitative tests for being a causal explanation for the fact. Together, these findings suggest a path to producing models with a greatly reduced probability of catastrophic tail risks.
Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/foundations-of-interpretability/?tab=overview
Recorded 02 September 2026. Michael Winer of The Alignment Research Center presents "Mechanistic Understanding of Multilayer Perceptrons" at IPAM's Foundations of Interpretability Workshop.
Abstract: By far the most common way to estimate an expected loss in machine learning is to draw samples, compute the loss on each one, and take the empirical average. However, sampling is not necessarily optimal. Given an MLP at initialization, we show how to estimate its expected output without running samples through the network at all. Instead, we produce approximate representations of the distributions of activations at each layer, leveraging tools such as cumulants and Hermite expansions. For sufficiently wide networks, our estimator achieves a target mean squared error using substantially fewer FLOPs than Monte Carlo sampling. We find moreover that our methods perform particularly well at estimating the probabilities of rare events. Finally, our methods pass various qualitative tests for being a causal explanation for the fact. Together, these findings suggest a path to producing models with a greatly reduced probability of catastrophic tail risks.
Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/foundations-of-interpretability/?tab=overview
