After tinkering with Gemma Scope 2, I now have an mechanistic explanation of why Winsorization was as effective as it was in my ablation experiments on Gemma 3 12B Instruct. In short, the activation for the BOS token overwhelms everything else. Gemma Scope 2 deliberately did not train on the BOS token. Winsorization capped the magnitude of the BOS token, allowing the activations of other tokens to be compared.
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After tinkering with Gemma Scope 2, I now have an mechanistic explanation of why Winsorization was as effective as it was in my ablation experiments on Gemma 3 12B Instruct. In short, the activation for the BOS token overwhelms everything else. Gemma Scope 2 deliberately did not train on the BOS token. Winsorization capped the magnitude of the BOS token, allowing the activations of other tokens to be compared.
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https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-scope-2-12b-it
google/gemma-scope-2-12b-it
model
resource
https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-scope-2-12b-it
new_line
new_line
After tinkering with Gemma Scope 2, I now have an mechanistic explanation of why Winsorization was as effective as it was in my ablation experiments on Gemma 3 12B Instruct. In short, the activation for the BOS token overwhelms everything else. Gemma Scope 2 deliberately did not train on the BOS token. Winsorization capped the magnitude of the BOS token, allowing the activations of other tokens to be compared.
https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-scope-2-12b-it


🚀
John6666