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Technical Glossary

Clear explanations of the terms, methods, and model-internals vocabulary used throughout the Research Notes.

← Knowledge Base 48 concepts

Affine map

A transformation that applies a linear map and then adds a fixed offset; it preserves …

Attention mask

A model or library rule that marks usable positions or specifies which sequence positions …

Base-rate bias

A low absolute probe-token rank can reflect its prompt-conditioned baseline or a …

Best-rank

The minimum vocabulary rank a pre-specified probe token hits across layers, positions, and …

BF16, FP16, and FP32

Floating-point formats for model arithmetic: 32-bit floating point (FP32), standard 16-bit …

Bootstrap

A resampling method that repeatedly draws observed units with replacement to study how a …

Brier loss

The average squared gap between a stated probability and the zero-or-one outcome that …

Cosine similarity

A comparison of two nonzero vectors based on the angle between them rather than their …

Data leakage

An accidental flow of information across an evaluation boundary that makes held-out …

Dtype

The data type (dtype) of a tensor or array: the storage format shared by every element, …

Embedding

A vector of numbers used to represent an item so a model or retrieval system can compare …

Feed-forward network (FFN)

A computation with no feedback cycle; in a Transformer, usually the shared position-wise …

Fisher's exact test

An exact conditional test for association in a count table, commonly used for a 2 by 2 …

Gini impurity

A measure of how mixed the class labels are inside a group of rows, used by decision trees …

Greedy continuation

The model's generated text when each next token is chosen as the single …

Hidden bridge

An intermediate entity that logically links a two-hop question to its answer while …

i.i.d.

Independent and identically distributed: each draw is independent of the others and from …

Imputation

A documented rule for filling missing values so an analysis can use a complete table …

Jacobian lens

A corpus-averaged linear map that turns a mid-layer residual-stream state into …

L2 normalization

Rescaling a nonzero vector to Euclidean length one while preserving its direction.

Log loss

The average negative logarithm of the probability a model gave to what actually happened, …

Logit lens

The free mid-layer readout that skips any fitted transport: unembed the residual as if it …

Matmul

Matrix multiplication: the core linear-algebra operation behind attention, multilayer …

Mean pooling

A rule that averages selected vectors to produce one summary vector.

Motor layer / motor-late

A late, near-output regime; in one scoped 397B analysis, digit-direction vocabulary-score …

Multilayer perceptron (MLP)

The position-wise nonlinear feed-forward sublayer that transforms each token state and …

p-value

A tail probability under a stated null model: how often that null produces a result at …

Pearson correlation

A number from negative one to positive one that summarizes the direction and strength of a …

Principal component analysis (PCA)

A linear dimensionality-reduction method that replaces numerical feature columns with new …

Prompt echo

When a lens lights up words that were already in the prompt; looks like a finding, often …

Random-J

A family of randomized Jacobian-lens controls; each construction states which scale or …

Rank

Position of a target token ID in a scored vocabulary list (1 = highest-scoring). Lower is …

Relevance judgments

Reference labels that say which documents are considered relevant to each evaluation …

Residual stream

The model's running hidden-state channel: each layer reads it, adds an update, and passes …

Retrieval ranking metrics

Measures that compare a ranked retrieval list with relevance judgments, including …

Root mean square (RMS)

The square root of the mean squared coordinates of a vector, used here as a measure of …

Sampling

Choosing the next token from a distribution over the vocabulary, rather than always taking …

Standard deviation

A measure of how far values in one numerical feature typically spread around their mean.

Standard scaling

A feature-wise transformation that subtracts each column's mean and divides by that …

Survival-identity vocabulary

The frozen probe list for the primary self-vs-other-model battery; its exact normalized …

Temperature

A scalar that sharpens or flattens the next-token distribution before sampling.

Thinking on / off

The template-controlled reasoning protocols used in these notes: reasoning enabled, or …

Tokenization

The model-specific process that divides an input into tokens and maps those tokens to …

Top-p

Nucleus sampling: keep only the smallest set of tokens whose cumulative probability …

Transformer

A family of sequence-processing neural networks that combine attention, position-wise …

Unembedding

The final linear map from residual-stream coordinates to a score for every vocabulary …

Wilcoxon signed-rank test

A paired test that uses each gap's direction and its absolute-size rank, not just win …

Workspace

A workspace-like mid-network regime studied through selected residual directions and …