September 25, 2024

“[Paper] A is for Absorption: Studying Feature Splitting and Absorption in Sparse Autoencoders” by chanind, TomasD, hrdkbhatnagar, Joseph Bloom

7 minutes

This research was completed for London AI Safety Research (LASR) Labs 2024. The team was supervised by Joseph Bloom (Decode Research). Find out more about the programme and express interest in upcoming iterations here.

This high level summary will be most accessible to those with relevant context including an understanding of SAEs. The importance of this work rests in part on the surrounding hype, and potential philosophical issues. We encourage readers seeking technical details to read the paper on arxiv.

TLDR: This is a short post summarising the key ideas and implications of our recent work studying how character information represented in language models is extracted by SAEs. Our most important result shows that SAE latents can appear to classify some feature of the input, but actually turn out to be quite unreliable classifiers (much worse than linear probes). We think this unreliability is in part due to difference [...]

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First published:

September 25th, 2024

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3zBsxeZzd3cvuueMJ/paper-a-is-for-absorption-studying-feature-splitting-and

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