Interpreting Black Box Transformer Models

Million- to billion-parameter transformer models seem like huge black boxes that nobody can interpret. As a result, many developers and users have sometimes been discouraged when dealing with these mind-blowing models. However, recent research has begun to solve the problem with innovative, cutting-edge tools.

It is beyond the scope of this book to describe all of the explainable AI methods and algorithms. So instead, this chapter will focus on ready-to-use visual interfaces that provide insights for transformer model developers and users.

The chapter begins by installing and running BertViz by Jesse Vig. Jesse did quite an excellent job of building a visual interface that shows the activity in the attention heads of a BERT transformer model. BertViz interacts with the BERT models and provides a well-designed interactive interface.

We will continue to focus on visualizing the activity of transformer models with the Language Interpretability...