Inseq: An Interpretability Toolkit for Sequence Generation Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Past work in natural language processing interpretability focused mainly on popular classification tasks while largely overlooking generation settings, partly due to a lack of dedicated tools. In this work, we introduce Inseq, a Python library to democratize access to interpretability analyses of sequence generation models. Inseq enables intuitive and optimized extraction of models' internal information and feature importance scores for popular decoder-only and encoder-decoder Transformers architectures. We showcase its potential by adopting it to highlight gender biases in machine translation models and locate factual knowledge inside GPT-2. Thanks to its extensible interface supporting cutting-edge techniques such as contrastive feature attribution, Inseq can drive future advances in explainable natural language generation, centralizing good practices and enabling fair and reproducible model evaluations.
Key facts. Cited by 78 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 69 of its 87 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2023.
Builds on
69 of 87 references.
References · 69
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 17; 2024: 27; 2025: 22; 2026: 12.
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