NOTE: An updated version of this paper was published at ICLR 2025. This codebase is from an older version of the paper; please reach out to me via email if you are looking for the updated code.

This repository contains code for the arXiv preprint "Answer, Assemble, Ace: Understanding How Transformers Answer Multiple Choice Questions".

If you use this code or find our paper valuable, please cite:

@inproceedings{
  wiegreffe2025answer,
  title={Answer, Assemble, Ace: Understanding How {LM}s Answer Multiple Choice Questions},
  author={Sarah Wiegreffe and Oyvind Tafjord and Yonatan Belinkov and Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Ashish Sabharwal},
  booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2025},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=6NNA0MxhCH}
}

Some of this code is inspired by or modified from Kevin Meng's memit codebase and Jack Merullo's lm_vector_arithmetic codebase, and I have mentioned this explicitly in the docstrings of the relevant files.

The Memory Colors dataset (memory_colors.csv) is extracted from this paper's Appendix table and is also available here as a HuggingFace dataset.

Setup

Necessary packages for the project are listed in requirements.txt. Code is formatted with black and isort.

You'll also need to clone the MEMIT repository as we will use their file util/nethook.py to capture hidden states in the model. Once you clone the directory, you can either 1) copy the file into a folder called util/ in this directory, or 2) add the directory to your PYTHONPATH (such as via export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/path/to/memit/). The script is called as from util import nethook.

Usage

The main entrypoint is the run_experiments.py script. For each run, you will need to specify a --model and --dataset.

A standard command looks as follows:

python run_experiments.py
  --in_context_examples 3
  --icl_labels ABB
  --model {llama2-7b, llama2-13b, llama2-7b-chat, llama2-13b-chat, olmo-7b, olmo-7b-sft, olmo-v1.7-7b, olmo-v1.7-7b-350B, olmo-v1.7-7b-1T}
  --llama_path /path/to/llama2 [required only if using llama2 models]
  --dataset {hellaswag, mmlu, prototypical_colors}

For HellaSwag, add --split val to replicate the paper in running on the validation set.

For the "A:__B:__" prompt format instead of "A:__B:__", add --inverse.

For the "C:__D:__" prompt format, add --cd_label_mapping.

For "C:__D:__", add both --inverse and --cd_label_mapping.

All results will write out to a results/ directory in the root of the project. Add flag --override to overwrite existing results.

Running Evaluation of Models

Add --function calculate_acc.

Running Vocabulary Projection

Add

--function {vocab_projection_coarse, vocab_projection_finegrained_mlpOutput, vocab_projection_finegrained_attnOutput, vocab_projection_finegrained_attnHeads}

Running Activation Patching

Add

  --function {trace_all, trace_layer, trace_attn, trace_mlp, trace_attn_heads}
  --base_prompt {standard, inverse, cd_label_mapping, cd_label_mapping+inverse}
  --prompt_to_sub_in {standard, inverse, cd_label_mapping, cd_label_mapping+inverse}
  --num_instances 1000 [if directly replicating the paper]

Non-MCQA Experiments

For experiments on the generative version of the Colors task in section 4.3 & Figure 3 of the paper, add --scoring_type next_token. Otherwise, by default, the scripts will use --scoring_type enumerated, meaning that the prompt will be formatted as MCQA and model performance will be judged by comparing the scores assigned to the "A" and "B" tokens.