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Main Authors: Lee, Daniel J., Heimersheim, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12555
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author Lee, Daniel J.
Heimersheim, Stefan
author_facet Lee, Daniel J.
Heimersheim, Stefan
contents Sensitive directions experiments attempt to understand the computational features of Language Models (LMs) by measuring how much the next token prediction probabilities change by perturbing activations along specific directions. We extend the sensitive directions work by introducing an improved baseline for perturbation directions. We demonstrate that KL divergence for Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) reconstruction errors are no longer pathologically high compared to the improved baseline. We also show that feature directions uncovered by SAEs have varying impacts on model outputs depending on the SAE's sparsity, with lower L0 SAE feature directions exerting a greater influence. Additionally, we find that end-to-end SAE features do not exhibit stronger effects on model outputs compared to traditional SAEs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_12555
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating Sensitive Directions in GPT-2: An Improved Baseline and Comparative Analysis of SAEs
Lee, Daniel J.
Heimersheim, Stefan
Machine Learning
Sensitive directions experiments attempt to understand the computational features of Language Models (LMs) by measuring how much the next token prediction probabilities change by perturbing activations along specific directions. We extend the sensitive directions work by introducing an improved baseline for perturbation directions. We demonstrate that KL divergence for Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) reconstruction errors are no longer pathologically high compared to the improved baseline. We also show that feature directions uncovered by SAEs have varying impacts on model outputs depending on the SAE's sparsity, with lower L0 SAE feature directions exerting a greater influence. Additionally, we find that end-to-end SAE features do not exhibit stronger effects on model outputs compared to traditional SAEs.
title Investigating Sensitive Directions in GPT-2: An Improved Baseline and Comparative Analysis of SAEs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12555