exege is a light, framework-agnostic package for understanding and evaluating scientific machine-learning models. It takes its name from the Greek stem exēgē-, associated with explanation and interpretation.
It reads the activations recorded from inside a model — an emulator of the atmosphere or the ocean, say — and asks what its internal channels respond to: which ones light up over a region, where else the model looks the same, what the main patterns are, how they evolve from one step to the next, and what a perturbation did to them. On top of that it trains sparse autoencoders whose features are easier to name than channels, scores them on data they never saw, and steers a model along one of them to see what it does.
```{admonition} Research tool :class: note
exege is early. What these pages describe works; expect it to change.
## What is in it
- **`exege.latents`** — [latent diagnostics](/exege/archives.html): regions, bases, time series,
comparisons between runs, and the fields a feature goes with. Also
[steering](/exege/steering.html) and [experiment records](/exege/records.html).
- **`exege.nn`** — [sparse autoencoders](/exege/nn.html) trained on those latents, and their
[held-out evaluation](/exege/evaluation.html).
- **`exege.figures`** — maps and figures, with no web framework in them.
- **`exege.app`** — [a local web app](/exege/app.html) over all of the above.
Every API returns objects and prints nothing; the [command line](/exege/cli.rst) is one client of
it, a notebook another. New to it? [Install it](/exege/installing.html), then follow the
[quickstart](/exege/quickstart.html), which needs no model and no data.
## How to cite
exege reimplements and builds on the work of others; [Background](/exege/background.html) lists the
papers behind it. Cite them if you use it.
## Table of contents
```{toctree}
:maxdepth: 1
installing
quickstart
:caption: Latent diagnostics
:maxdepth: 1
archives
regions
bases
time
comparing
features
provenance
:caption: Sparse autoencoders
:maxdepth: 1
nn
evaluation
:caption: Experiments and the app
:maxdepth: 1
steering
records
app
:caption: Extending exege
:maxdepth: 1
design
adapters
:caption: Reference
:maxdepth: 1
cli
archive-format
api/latents
api/nn
api/figures
api/adapters
:caption: About
:maxdepth: 1
background
roadmap