Trackstar

trackstar is a high-level composed pipeline that runs hessians, build, and score as a single command. It computes separate hessians on the value (training) and query datasets, mixes them, builds a query gradient index, and scores the value dataset.

This implements the methodology described in Scalable Influence and Fact Tracing for Large Language Model Pretraining (Bae et al., 2024), which extends TRAK with mixed hessians for large-scale language model attribution.

What It Produces

A directory at run_path with the following subdirectories:

  • value_hessian/ — hessian fitted on the value (training) dataset.

  • query_hessian/ — hessian fitted on the query dataset.

  • mixed_hessian/ — mixed hessian combining value and query statistics. Contains mix_config.json, normalizers.pth, hessians.pth, hessians_eigen.pth, and processor_config.json.

  • query/ — gradient index built on the query dataset (same artifacts as build).

  • scores/ — scores for the value dataset (same artifacts as score).

Key Options

  • --data.dataset: the value (training) dataset.

  • --query.dataset: the query dataset.

  • --target_downweight_components: number of gradient components to downweight when mixing hessians (default 1000).

Example

bergson trackstar runs/my-trackstar \
    --model EleutherAI/pythia-14m \
    --data.dataset NeelNanda/pile-10k \
    --data.truncation \
    --query.dataset NeelNanda/pile-10k \
    --query.truncation \
    --projection_dim 16

See Command Line Interface for the full TrackstarConfig API reference.