Evidence map›Paper›PMID 38248167›Full record

ArticleEntropy (Basel, Switzerland)2023

Seeing Is Believing: Brain-Inspired Modular Training for Mechanistic Interpretability.

Ziming Liu, Eric Gan, Max Tegmark

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed
6.3field-weighted citation impact, top 3% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Article
  3. Metacognition of ChatGPT in confidence judgements.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2026
    Article
  4. Article
  5. Article
  6. Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Ziming LiuInstitute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Eric GanInstitute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Max TegmarkInstitute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-7670-7190
The NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions · US

Funding

The NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions PHY-2019786
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

We introduce Brain-Inspired Modular Training (BIMT), a method for making neural networks more modular and interpretable. Inspired by brains, BIMT embeds neurons in a geometric space and augments the loss function with a cost proportional to the length of each neuron connection. This is inspired by the idea of minimum connection cost in evolutionary biology, but we are the first the combine this idea with training neural networks with gradient descent for interpretability. We demonstrate that BIMT discovers useful modular neural networks for many simple tasks, revealing compositional structures in symbolic formulas, interpretable decision boundaries and features for classification, and mathematical structure in algorithmic datasets. Qualitatively, BIMT-trained networks have modules readily identifiable by the naked eye, but regularly trained networks seem much more complicated. Quantitatively, we use Newman's method to compute the modularity of network graphs; BIMT achieves the highest modularity for all our test problems. A promising and ambitious future direction is to apply the proposed method to understand large models for vision, language, and science.

Indexed as

brain-inspired artificial intelligencemechanistic interpretabilitymodularity

Identifiers

PMID38248167
PMCPMC10814460
OpenAlexW4390467836

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.