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It does seem like latent space is the most efficient place to do deliberation - like deep consideration before putting your thoughts into words.

it does. but every time i start thinking in that direction, i can’t convince myself i’m not engaging in magic thinking. like maybe i’m just hoping the algorithms will save me without really understanding the problem. and i’m not sure **how** to understand latent space at scale

Definitely. For me, latent spaces are best interpreted by moving in them rather than looking statically. Seeing how the outputs change while moving one number at a time in the latent space shows what the dimensions "mean". But that doesn't help much at scale.

yeah, that part was hard to digest. the coprocessor generates embeddings that are fed into the kv cache (attention blocks) of the main model. yes, the main model is frozen. well, both are, but the expert is trained after the main model

What I understand is the the expert inserts embeddings in the kv cache of the main model. The final answer is taken from the main model and losses back propagated through the coprocessor. This way the coprocessor knows what to insert inside the main model.

interesting, i’ve heard of CAVs, but they always seemed more of a gray box approach. it seems like you could train a model to translate an embedding back into text. doesn’t seem like it would be too hard. also seems inevitable if we go all in on latent space

I believe the latent space almost always means that there's potential for more accessible information than just text with the space being continuously differentiable. I think of early days variational autoencoders that could be used to generate beyond training data

But translating embedding back to text seems to me not necessarily straightforward. Where I've seen success is when comparisons are done with a 'well-understood' embedding. I can see conversion to text being difficult in a similar way that there doesn't exist perfect translation between languages

im also curious if it could be combined with the byte level encoders, have an expert in understanding video, another for x-rays & MRIs, another for poetry, etc.

Thanks for the summary! Byte level encoders just exchanged the outer token interface, whereas latent / hidden-layer functionality can only be determined with an “fMRI” scan for which I think Sparse Auto-Encoders can be used. Adaptions based on such “scans” are still very rare afaik.

It doesn't really look like RAG at all, is it? It looks much more like a different way to handle internal thoughts in embedding space rather than forcing them to pick concrete tokens to give it space to calculate...

a lot of people see RAG as a cheaper way to get a domain specific version of a model. atm RAG is actually a reasonable approach, but this might be better

Yeah RAG can bring in domain grounding, and LoRA fine tuning can shift to domain styling/formatting. This seems more general than that: the main experiments I saw in the paper were training the coprocessor with the same pretraining as the base model. “To learn to think” more than domain adapt.