The Clock and the Pizza: NeurIPS 2023 paper on modular addition algorithms
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-27
Sharing the NeurIPS 2023 paper "The Clock and the Pizza: Two Stories in Mechanistic Explanation of Neural Networks" (Zhong, Liu, Tegmark, Andreas; arXiv:2306.17844).
- Using modular addition as a prototype, small changes to hyperparameters and initialization induce qualitatively different algorithms from the same training set
- Some networks implement the Clock algorithm; others implement the previously undescribed Pizza algorithm, or parallel implementations of multiple algorithms
- Even simple learning problems admit surprising solution diversity
Related event: NeurIPS Paper: Modular Addition Networks Can Discover Novel Pizza Algorithm(2 posts)→
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