In mechanistic interpretability, what type of model is trained on a network's internal activations to decompose them into a large set of sparse, more human-interpretable features, helping address superposition?
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Sparse autoencoder (SAE)
Sparse autoencoders learn an overcomplete, sparsely-activating dictionary of features from a model's activations, helping disentangle the "superposition" in which many concepts share the same neurons. They have become a leading tool for naming and steering the features a network uses.
Also asked as:
- In mechanistic interpretability, what overcomplete models are used to extract a dictionary of sparsely-activating features from a network's activations?