Mechanistic Interpretability Should Prioritize Feature Consistency in Sparse Autoencoders
Xiangchen Song Carnegie Mellon University, Aashiq Muhamed, Yujia Zheng Carnegie Mellon University, Lingjing Kong Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, Zeyu Tang Stanford University, Mona T. Diab Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Smith Carnegie Mellon University, Kun Zhang Carnegie Mellon University and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by the observed inconsistency of learned SAE features across different training runs, undermining reproducibility and complicating model comparison. We study run-to-run feature consistency in SAEs and argue that it should be reported as a standard evaluation axis alongside reconstruction and sparsity. We propose the Pairwise Dictionary Mean Correlation Coefficient (PW-MCC) as an assignment-based metric to quantify consistency and demonstrate that high levels are achievable (PW-MCC ≈ 0.80 for TopK SAEs on LLM activations) with appropriate architectural choices.Our contributions include: (i) theoretical grounding for strong consistency in the idealized setting of TopK SAEs; (ii) synthetic validation using a model organism, which verifies PW-MCC as a reliable proxy for ground-truth recovery; and (iii) empirical analysis on LLM activations, where PW-MCC correlates with the similarity of automatically generated natural-language feature explanations.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表