A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits

Perfect. Thank you! That explains why I couldn't find it.

EDIT: Spoke too soon. I think this covers some of the same ideas but it isn't the one I'm remembering. There's no method for simplifying the earlier layers of the transformer and exploiting the fact that they primarily learn bigrams. I could have sworn I read about it in an arxiv or openreview paper.

Is this the one? SkipBERT

Reading through it now. It was on my reading list but it doesn’t look familiar.

This is a really interesting article!

I saw that you found the paper that you were looking for but this one is also an interesting read on the same topic https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09418

Might be worth checking out

Thanks, I’ll take a look!

"Are Neighbors Enough"'s authors swap out self-attention in a Transformer for a multi-head neural n-gram model? Perhaps that's what you're looking for?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13354

It isn’t but interesting paper!