Murano

Murano is a mechanistic interpretability framework for recording activations, finding directions, steering generations, probing representations, and running reproducible experiment pipelines.

Install

pip install murano-interp

The base install is deliberately lean: it carries only what every workflow needs (recording, steering, intervention, the causal substrate). Feature-specific libraries ship as extras, so you install per use case:

Extra	Use case	Pulls in
(base)	recording, steering, intervention, logits, ablation, metrics, paired datasets	nnsight, nnterp, torch, transformers
probe	linear probing	scikit-learn
data	loading datasets by name from the Hub	datasets
plot	figures and visualizations	matplotlib, seaborn, plotly
sae	sparse autoencoder features	sae-lens
all	everything above	all of the above

pip install "murano-interp[probe,plot]"   # combine as needed
pip install "murano-interp[all]"          # everything

Calling a feature whose extra is missing raises a clear error naming the extra to install. The PyPI distribution is murano-interp (the bare name murano belongs to an unrelated OpenStack project); the module name is unchanged: import murano.

For a development install from source, into a fresh virtual environment:

git clone https://github.com/UKPLab/murano.git
cd murano
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate      # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e ".[all]"

Requires Python 3.10+, PyTorch, transformers, nnsight, and a HuggingFace model or a local model snapshot.

Quick Start

import murano

model = murano.Model("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct")

# Record activations on any text
acts = model.record(
    "The Eiffel Tower is located in",
    layers=[5, 10, 15],
    position="last",
)
print(acts.positive[10].shape)

# Find a contrastive direction
direction = model.find_direction(
    positive=["What a wonderful, delightful day", "This is fantastic and uplifting"],
    negative=["What a miserable, dreadful day", "This is awful and depressing"],
)
print(direction.best_layer)

# Generate with ablation or steering
ablated = model.generate("The movie was", ablate=direction)
steered = model.generate("The restaurant was", steer=(direction, 1.5))

Pipeline API

For structured experiments, use the same logic through explicit steps.

from murano import MuranoDataset, MuranoModel, Pipeline
from murano.steps import (
    Intervene,
    Load,
    Record,
    SteeringVector,
)
from murano.steps.intervene import ablate_direction

model = MuranoModel("meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct")

dataset = MuranoDataset.contrastive(
    positive=["What a wonderful, delightful day"],
    negative=["What a miserable, dreadful day"],
    template_fn=model.chat_template,
)

train_output = Pipeline([
    Load(dataset),
    Record(model, layers="all", position="mean"),
    SteeringVector(normalize=True),
]).run()

eval_output = Pipeline([
    Load(dataset),
    Intervene(model, ablate_direction(train_output["steering"].direction_per_layer)),
]).run()

Step API Reference

Every step declares the keys it reads from and writes to Results. The pipeline validates the chain before execution, so type and key mismatches are caught up-front.

Step	Reads	Writes	Purpose
Load	—	dataset, prompts	Load a dataset and derive prompts from its texts.
LoadPrompts	—	prompts	Load raw prompts directly without a dataset.
LoadPaired ‡	—	dataset, prompts, corrupt_prompts	Load matched clean/corrupt prompt pairs for causal comparison.
Record	dataset	record	Capture residual-stream activations via nnsight.
SteeringVector	record	steering	Find a contrastive steering direction (mean diff).
Intervene	prompts	intervene	Generate baseline + intervened outputs side-by-side.
WeightAblation	prompts, steering	intervene, weight_ablation	Project a direction out of model weights, then generate.
Logits ‡	prompts	final_logits, attention_mask, target_ids	Run a forward pass and expose output logits plus next-token targets. With fn=, apply an intervention during that pass.
Ablate ‡	prompts	ablated_logits, attention_mask	Zero, mean, or resample a component and return the logits.
Sweep ‡	(the swept chain's)	sweep	Run a step chain once per item and harvest a metric into a SweepResult.
Probe §	record	probe	Train a linear probe per layer via cross-validation.
GenerationMetric	intervene	metric	Score baseline vs modified outputs with a user metric.
Metric steps ‡	logits keys	a metric key	Score a run into a comparable number: LogitDiffStep, KLDivergenceStep, AnswerLogProbStep, AnswerRankStep, RecoveredMetricStep.
Save	(any present)	output_dir	Persist all results to organized subdirectories.
SAEEncode †	prompts	sae_record	Encode residuals through an SAE loaded from HuggingFace.
SAETopActivations	sae_record	feature_examples	Rank the top-K activating contexts per SAE feature.
Plot *	(optional)	—	Render plots for whatever results are present (steering, probe, logit lens, logit attribution).

* Requires the [plot] extra: pip install -e .[plot]. † Requires the [sae] extra: pip install -e .[sae]. § Requires the [probe] extra: pip install -e .[probe]. ‡ Causal-analysis steps landing in 0.2.0; newer than the rest, API may still change.

To add your own step, subclass Step, set reads / writes (and optionally read_types / write_types), and implement __call__(results) -> Results.

Status

The Step API and the unmarked steps in the table above are alpha-stable for the 0.1.x line; the ‡ causal-analysis steps are newer and their API may still change. The logit lens ships as the LogitLens step, available through the Pipeline API like the other steps.

Core Ideas

• MuranoModel is a thin wrapper around nnterp's StandardizedTransformer (built on nnsight), which standardizes model internals across families.
• Pipeline, Step, and Results are the orchestration core.
• artifacts such as PromptBatch, ActivationStore, SteeringResult, GenerationComparison, MetricComparison, and MetricScore make experiment dataflow explicit.
• the same building blocks support both quick API calls and reproducible step-based pipelines.

Package Layout

src/murano/
  model.py
  pipeline.py
  results.py
  artifacts.py
  dataset.py
  io.py
  evaluation.py
  steps/
  plotting/

Notebooks

Start with notebooks/getting_started.ipynb, then pick the application you need:

• notebooks/applications/ — one self-contained notebook per application: steering, probing, logit lens, logit attribution, attention, ablation, activation patching, circuit discovery, metrics, custom pipelines, weight ablation, and sparse autoencoders.
• notebooks/reproductions/ — published results reproduced with Murano.

Every notebook is executed before it is committed, and all of them render on the documentation site.

Development

uv sync --all-extras --dev
python -m pytest -q

Citation

A citation for the accompanying publication will be added here on release. Until then, please cite this repository:

@software{murano,
  title  = {Murano: Mechanistic Interpretability Pipelines},
  author = {{UKP Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt}},
  url    = {https://github.com/UKPLab/murano},
  year   = {2026}
}

Contact & Maintainers

Murano is developed and maintained by the Mechanistic Interpretability Team of Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

For questions, bug reports, and feature requests, please open an issue on the issue tracker.

Disclaimer

This repository contains experimental software and is published to provide additional background details for the associated research. It is a research framework, provided as-is and without warranty; APIs may change between releases.