GLUScope: A Tool for Analyzing GLU Neurons in Transformer Language Models

arXiv:2602.23826v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present **GLUScope**, an open-source resource for analyzing neurons in Transformer-based language models (LMs), intended for interpretability researchers. We focus on the now-standard *GLU-based activation functions* such as SwiGLU, used in virtually all recent open-weights LMs. This introduces a new challenge: understanding positive activations is not enough. Instead, both the *gate* and the *in* activation of a neuron can be positive or negative, leading to four different possible sign combinations (*activation quadrants*) that in some cases have quite different functionalities (e.g. promoting vs. suppressing a specific set of tokens). Accordingly, for any neuron, our tool shows text examples for each of the four sign combinations, and indicates how often each combination occurs. Our resource can lead to novel insights: in particular, thanks to analyzing all four activation quadrants, it can surface interpretable behavior that other tools would miss. We also release the code used to create the resource, thus enabling researchers to build on it by adding more models, text corpora, or neuron pages.