Bergson

Bergson is a python library which provides scalable, state-of-the-art data attribution methods for large language models. Data attribution methods estimate the effect on a behavior of interest of removing data points from a model's training corpus. We support EK-FAC (2023), TrackStar (2024), SOURCE (2024), MAGIC (2025), gradient cosine similarity, and more.

We try to make research and application straightforward. You can reproduce any of your runs with a single line, use a few CLI flags to save and re-use useful intermediate artifacts, do everything using just the CLI or just code, train models here or use existing ones, tune and evaluate your methods, and scale them up to multi-node runs with 70B+ parameters. More information is available in the Bergson docs.

Installation

Bergson can be installed using pip:

pip install bergson

Or you can clone the repository and install locally:

git clone https://github.com/EleutherAI/bergson.git
cd bergson
pip install -e .

Functionality

Attribute through Training

bergson magic runs a powerful attribution method that backpropagates through the training process to compute the gradient of a model behavior loss with respect to a weighting placed on each training item. It is powered by our twice-differentiable trainer, which can also be called directly using bergson train.

Note: unrolled differentiation efficacy is proportional to metasmoothness. Untuned training hyperparameters can result in disappointing linear datamodeling scores. Check your run's estimated metasmoothness with bergson metasmoothness.

bergson approxunrolling is an approximation of bergson magic that uses a handful of training checkpoints to run the multi-step SOURCE attribution pipeline. This is roughly equivalent to an influence function averaged over several checkpoints.

To build a train‑time gradient store, use our HF Trainer callback. This will incur a ~17% performance overhead.

Attribute Post-Hoc

Bergson supports on-disk gradient stores and on-the-fly queries, and per-token and per-sequence attribution.

bergson trackstar and bergson ekfac both orchestrate multi-step attribution recipes over a model checkpoint.

At a lower level, you can build your own gradient store for efficient serial queries using bergson build. Collection-time gradient compression makes the store space-efficient, and a FAISS integration enables fast KNN search over large stores - see bergson query, or Attributor in the programmatic interface. For small queries and methods that don't use gradient compression (e.g., EK-FAC), you can score a dataset in a single pass using an in-memory query index of precomputed gradients. Dataset items may be scored using max, mean, and individual scoring strategies, enabling LESS-style data filtering. See bergson score and bergson build or bergson reduce.

Per-module and per-attention head gradients can be extracted from the store.

Note: influence functions can be sensitive to both Hessian approximation inversion hyperparameters and metasmoothness. Untuned hyperparameters can result in a linear datamodeling score of zero.

Evaluate

Use bergson validate and bergson recall to compute LDS and recall@k metrics respectively.

Examples

There are many example YAMLs in the examples directory. use bergson <yaml_path> to try them. For example, to MAGIC-attribute a GPT-2 WikiText fine-tune:

bergson examples/magic/gpt2_wikitext_tiny.yaml

Or check out a notebook for programmatic usage:

	Notebook	Description
	Poison Detection	Detect poisoned training examples with gradient attribution (T4, ~5 min)
	Style Ablation	Suppress style to recover semantic matching (A100, ~20 min)

Construct and query an on-disk index of randomly projected gradients:

bergson build runs/index --model EleutherAI/pythia-14m --dataset NeelNanda/pile-10k --truncation --token_batch_size 4096 --projection_dim 16
bergson query --index runs/index --unit_norm

Collect TrackStar attribution scores for an I.I.D sample query:

bergson trackstar runs/trackstar --model EleutherAI/pythia-14m --query.dataset NeelNanda/pile-10k --data.dataset NeelNanda/pile-10k --data.truncation --token_batch_size 4096 --query.truncation --query.split "train[:20]"

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
pytest
pyright

We use conventional commits for releases.

If you have multiple GPUs, you can run pytest in distributed mode: pytest -n 8 --dist loadgroup.

Citation

If you found Bergson useful in your research, please cite us:

@misc{quirke2026bergsonopensourcelibrary,
      title={Bergson: An Open Source Library for Data Attribution},
      author={Lucia Quirke and Louis Jaburi and David Johnston and William Z. Li and Gonçalo Paulo and Guillaume Martres and Girish Gupta and Stella Biderman and Nora Belrose},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2606.11660},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11660},
}

Support

If you have suggestions, questions, or would like to collaborate, please email lucia@eleuther.ai or drop us a line in the #data-attribution channel of the EleutherAI Discord!