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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.18462 · updated 2026-10-18

Readout Scaling Shapes Sparse Feature Recovery

First page of Readout Scaling Shapes Sparse Feature Recovery
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.18462Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

RC-DS replaces standard centered-logit SAE training coordinates with coordinates canonicalized to remove readout singular-value gains while preserving decision information. It costs an additional coordinate transformation (available as an exact wrapper) and, per the paper's own controls, worse output-logit reconstruction than centered-logit SAEs in most tested settings. It can fail when the generating distribution differs from the assumed pre-readout space, since the benefit reverses with the data distribution, and reconstruction gains do not imply task-useful features, as the label-detection and steering controls indicate.

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research area
sparsity and pruning
technical change
Readout-canonicalized decision-space SAE training
published
2026-10-13

This is an interpretability research method whose benefit is distribution-dependent and whose production relevance for a constrained-infrastructure engineer is not established, so tracking it is warranted but adoption is not.

About the technical core

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    RC-DS replaces standard centered-logit SAE training coordinates with coordinates canonicalized to remove readout singular-value gains while preserving decision information. It costs an additional coordinate transformation (available as an exact wrapper) and, per the paper's own controls, worse output-logit reconstruction than centered-logit SAEs in most tested settings. It can fail when the generating distribution differs from the assumed pre-readout space, since the benefit reverses with the data distribution, and reconstruction gains do not imply task-useful features, as the label-detection and steering controls indicate.

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

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    When factors are generated before readout scaling, RC-DS raises mean sparse-factor recovery from 0.506 to 0.913 at condition number 100 under the same budget; it also improves gain-free reconstruction in all 18 tested task-sparsity settings on three fixed LM checkpoints, while centered-logit SAEs reconstruct output logits better in 17 of 18.

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quality

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latency

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data and training

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reproducibility

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arXiv 2610.18462

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