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Connections Between Superposition and Adversarial Robustness

Ascertain the causal relationships between superposition in neural representations and adversarial robustness, determining whether and how superposed feature encoding influences vulnerability or resilience to adversarial perturbations.

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Background

The review highlights a duality between interpretability and adversarial robustness, and superposition may modulate how models respond to perturbations by entangling features in overlapping directions.

Establishing this connection would provide theoretical and empirical guidance for designing models that balance representational efficiency with robustness and interpretability.

References

Superposition also raises open questions like operationalizing computation in superposition \citep{vaintrob_mathematical_2024}, attention head superposition \citep{elhage_toy_2022,jermyn_circuits_2023,lieberum_does_2023,gould_successor_2023}, representing feature clusters \citep{elhage_toy_2022}, connections to adversarial robustness \citep{elhage_toy_2022}, anti-correlated feature organization \citep{elhage_toy_2022}, and architectural effects \citep{nanda_200superposition_2023}.

Mechanistic Interpretability for AI Safety -- A Review (2404.14082 - Bereska et al., 22 Apr 2024) in Future Directions, Subsection 8.1 Clarifying Concepts — Corroborate or Refute Core Assumptions