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abstract indexed · arXiv 2609.35367 · updated 2026-10-18

From Input to Output: A Flexible Agent for Dual-End Interpretation of Sparse Autoencoder Features

First page of From Input to Output: A Flexible Agent for Dual-End Interpretation of Sparse Autoencoder Features
From the original paper · arXiv 2609.35367Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

DAFI replaces costly large-corpus activation scans and single-sided SAE feature labeling with an agent that iteratively probes inputs with short contexts and refines input-side, output-side, and functional interpretations; it does not replace any production inference component. The cost is LLM agent calls per feature (reported as more token-efficient than a general-purpose coding agent, but still a per-feature expense at SAE scale), plus dependence on an existing trained SAE and an API-accessible LLM. It can fail when endpoint interpretations are unreliable (the paper's 70.7% non-equivalence finding applies only to features with reliable endpoints), and feature labels may not transfer across model or SAE configurations.

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recommendation
test
research area
other
technical change
Agentic dual-end SAE feature interpretation
published
2026-09-28

This is a mechanistic interpretability research tool rather than a production optimization, so it matters only if the team already audits or steers model internals, in which case the open-source code and API-based agent make small-scale validation feasible on constrained infrastructure.

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    DAFI replaces costly large-corpus activation scans and single-sided SAE feature labeling with an agent that iteratively probes inputs with short contexts and refines input-side, output-side, and functional interpretations; it does not replace any production inference component. The cost is LLM agent calls per feature (reported as more token-efficient than a general-purpose coding agent, but still a per-feature expense at SAE scale), plus dependence on an existing trained SAE and an API-accessible LLM. It can fail when endpoint interpretations are unreliable (the paper's 70.7% non-equivalence finding applies only to features with reliable endpoints), and feature labels may not transfer across model or SAE configurations.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Improves Input score by 13.1 percentage points over SAGE and Output score by 38.9 points over Token Change on GemmaScope; distilled skills raise held-out joint pass rate from 58.0% to 92.0%; also improves steering-feature selection on AxBench over output-score filtering.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-18. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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arXiv 2609.35367

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