Language models (LMs) have proven to be powerful tools for psycholinguistic research, but most prior work has focused on purely behavioural measures (e.g., surprisal comparisons). At the same time, research in model interpretability has begun to illuminate the abstract causal mechanisms shaping LM behavior. To help bring these strands of research closer together, we introduce CausalGym. We adapt and expand the SyntaxGym suite of tasks to benchmark the ability of interpretability methods to causally affect model behaviour. To illustrate how CausalGym can be used, we study the pythia models (14M--6.9B) and assess the causal efficacy of a wide range of interpretability methods, including linear probing and distributed alignment search (DAS). We find that DAS outperforms the other methods, and so we use it to study the learning trajectory of two difficult linguistic phenomena in pythia-1b: negative polarity item licensing and filler--gap dependencies. Our analysis shows that the mechanism implementing both of these tasks is learned in discrete stages, not gradually.

Identifying sleep problem severity from overnight polysomnography (PSG) recordings plays an important role in diagnosing and treating sleep disorders such as the Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). This analysis traditionally is done by specialists manually through visual inspections, which can be tedious, time-consuming, and is prone to subjective errors. One of the solutions is to use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) where the convolutional and pooling layers behave as feature extractors and some fully-connected (FCN) layers are used for making final predictions for the OSA severity. In this paper, a CNN architecture with 1D convolutional and FCN layers for classification is presented. The PSG data for this project are from the Cleveland Children's Sleep and Health Study database and classification results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed CNN method. The proposed 1D CNN model achieves excellent classification results without manually preprocesssing PSG signals such as feature extraction and feature reduction.