Intepretability
Views my own
I don't think zero ablation is that great a baseline. We're mostly using it for continuity's sake with Anthropic's prior work (and also it's a bit easier to explain than a mean ablation baseline which requires specifying where the mean is calculated from). In the updated paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16014v2 (up in a few hours) we show all the CE loss numbers for anyone to scale how they wish.
I don't think compute efficiency hit[1] is ideal. It's really expensive to compute, since you can't just calculate it from an SAE alone as you need to know facts about smaller LLMs. It also doesn't transfer as well between sites (splicing in an attention layer SAE doesn't impact loss much, splicing in an MLP SAE impacts loss more, and residual stream SAEs impact loss the most). Overall I expect it's a useful expensive alternative to loss recovered, not a replacement.
EDIT: on consideration of Leo's reply, I think my point about transfer is wrong; a metric like "compute efficiency recovered" could always be created by rescaling the compute efficiency number.
What I understand "compute efficiency hit" to mean is: for a given (SAE, ) pair, how much less compute you'd need (as a multiplier) to train a different LM, such that gets the same loss as -with-the-SAE-spliced-in.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the reinitialization approach" but feature death doesn't seem to be a major issue at the moment. At all sites besides L27, our Gemma-7B SAEs didn't have much feature death at all (stats at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16014v2 up in a few hours), and also the Anthropic update suggests even in small models the problem can be addressed.
The "This should be cited" part of Dan H's comment was edited in after the author's reply. I think this is in bad faith since it masks an accusation of duplicate work as a request for work to be cited.
On the other hand the post's authors did not act in bad faith since they were responding to an accusation of duplicate work (they were not responding to a request to improve the work).
(The authors made me aware of this fact)
I think this discussion is sad, since it seems both sides assume bad faith from the other side. On one hand, I think Dan H and Andy Zou have improved the post by suggesting writing about related work, and signal-boosting the bypassing refusal result, so should be acknowledged in the post (IMO) rather than downvoted for some reason. I think that credit assignment was originally done poorly here (see e.g. "Citing others" from this Chris Olah blog post), but the authors resolved this when pushed.
But on the other hand, "Section 6.2 of the RepE paper shows exactly this" and accusations of plagiarism seem wrong @Dan H. Changing experimental setups and scaling them to larger models is valuable original work.
(Disclosure: I know all authors of the post, but wasn't involved in this project)
(ETA: I added the word "bypassing". Typo.)
We use learning rate 0.0003 for all Gated SAE experiments, and also the GELU-1L baseline experiment. We swept for optimal baseline learning rates on GELU-1L for the baseline SAE to generate this value.
For the Pythia-2.8B and Gemma-7B baseline SAE experiments, we divided the L2 loss by , motivated by wanting better hyperparameter transfer, and so changed learning rate to 0.001 or 0.00075 for all the runs (currently in Figure 1, only attention output pre-linear uses 0.00075. In the rerelease we'll state all the values used). We didn't see noticable difference in the Pareto frontier changing between 0.001 and 0.00075 so did not sweep the baseline hyperparameter further than this.
Oh oops, thanks so much. We'll update the paper accordingly. Nit: it's actually
(it's just minimizing a quadratic)
ETA: the reason we have complicated equations is that we didn't compute during training (this quantity is kinda weird). However, you can compute from quantities that are usually tracked in SAE training. Specifically, and all terms here are clearly helpful to track in SAE training.
It's very impressive that this technique could be used alongside existing finetuning tools.
> According to our data, this technique stacks additively with both finetuning
To check my understanding, the evidence for this claim in the paper is Figure 13, where your method stacks with finetuning to increase sycophancy. But there are not currently results on decreasing sycophancy (or any other bad capability), where you show your method stacks with finetuning, right?
(AFAICT currently Figure 13 shows some evidence that activation addition to reduce sycophancy outcompetes finetuning, but you're unsure about the statistical significance due to the low percentages involved)
I previously thought that L1 penalties were just exactly what you wanted to do sparse reconstruction.
Thinking about your undershooting claim, I came up with a toy example that made it obvious to me that the Anthropic loss function was not optimal: suppose you are role-playing a single-feature SAE reconstructing the number 2, and are given loss equal to the squared error of your guess, plus the norm of your guess. Then guessing x>0 gives loss minimized at x=3/2, not 2
I really appreciated this retrospective, this changed my mind about the sparsity penalty, thanks!
Ah yeah, Neel's comment makes no claims about feature death beyond Pythia 2.8B residual streams. I trained 524K width Pythia-2.8B MLP SAEs with <5% feature death (not in paper), and Anthropic's work gets to >1M live features (with no claims about interpretability) which together would make me surprised if 131K was near the max of possible numbers of live features even in small models.