pair-code/pretraining-tda — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-07-18 · repo last pushed 2025-02-11
Investigate which training passages caused a model to hallucinate a specific fact.
Compare different tracing algorithms like BM25, TRAK, and TrackStar on the same queries.
Browse proponent and opponent training passages for factual prompts in a local web viewer.
Use the included 5,400 test prompts as a benchmark dataset for new tracing methods.
| pair-code/pretraining-tda | brennanconroy/shootr | mkmukesh1319-ux/todo-list | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 33 | 33 | 33 |
| Language | JavaScript | JavaScript | JavaScript |
| Last pushed | 2025-02-11 | 2022-04-10 | — |
| Maintenance | Stale | Dormant | — |
| Setup difficulty | easy | hard | easy |
| Complexity | 3/5 | 3/5 | 1/5 |
| Audience | researcher | developer | vibe coder |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
The data viewer runs entirely in your web browser with no server or API keys required.
This repository accompanies a research paper on understanding where large language models (LLMs) get their facts. When an AI tells you that "Paris is the capital of France," it likely learned that by reading massive amounts of text during its initial training. This project provides the data and a web tool to help researchers trace a model's answer back to the specific sentences it was trained on. It essentially asks: which passages in the training data were the most influential in making the model give this specific answer? The repo provides pre-computed results from several different tracing methods. These results map test queries, like factual prompts about a person, place, or thing, to "proponents," which are the specific training passages that pushed the model toward its answer. Some methods also identify "opponents," or passages that pushed against the answer. Because these lists of text passages are dense and hard to read in a spreadsheet, the project includes a simple data viewer app. You can load the results directly in your web browser, and the app runs entirely on your computer without sending your data to a server. This tool is primarily for AI researchers and engineers who study model behavior, bias, and factuality. For example, if a model keeps hallucinating a fact, a researcher could use these tools to look at the proponents and see what kind of messy or contradictory training text caused the error. Alongside the tracing results, the repo also provides the raw test queries used to evaluate the AI, including a set of 5,400 factual prompts, and a massive corpus of nearly 20 million Wikipedia sentences used as the search space for the experiments. What's notable about this project is that it acts as a benchmarking package. Rather than just providing one method to trace a model's knowledge, it includes results from multiple different tracing algorithms (like BM25, TRAK, and TrackStar) applied to the same data. This allows researchers to compare how different approaches perform side-by-side using the same test queries and the same viewer tool.
A research toolkit for tracing which training sentences a language model used to answer factual questions, with pre-computed results from multiple tracing methods and a browser-based data viewer.
Mainly JavaScript. The stack also includes JavaScript, HTML, CSS.
Stale — no commits in 1-2 years (last push 2025-02-11).
No license information is provided in this repository.
Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.
Mainly researcher.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.