Journal article
Dictionaries Without Ontologies: What a Sparse Autoencoder Latent Is Evidence For, Why Decodability, Use and Reproducibility Do Not Add Up to Canonicity, and the Identifiability Premise No Real-Model Result Has Checked
Sparse autoencoders are now the default instrument for decomposing language model activations, and their latents are routinely reported as the model's features: units the network itself uses, which a wide enough dictionary has pulled out of superposition. This paper asks what a latent is evidence…