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TopicsSparse Autoencoders Mechanistic Interpretability SAEBench

Random-weight, L0-matched SAE baselines score substantially above chance on SAEBench sparse-probing tasks.

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random_l0_matched passes all six benchmarks (each crashes well below canonical), but the no-information floor is non-trivially high on sparse_probing (0.744) and sae-probes (0.745), so a casual benchmark consumer might mistake an L0-matched random projection for a weak but meaningful SAE.

Are Sparse Autoencoder Benchmarks Reliable?preprintextraction 0.70

Chanin, David · arXiv.org · May 18, 2026 · original

Appendix E: random-weight SAE with threshold tuned to match L0 vs canonical Gemma Scope 16k SAE (0.858 sparse probing, 0.881 sae-probes) under a reduced configuration

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