Evaluating SAE interpretability without generating explanations

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13305 Authors

Keywords: interpretability, explanation, sae, transcoder

TL;DR: Instead of evaluating whether explanations match activating contexts, we evaluate how much are activating contexts similar between themselves.

Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring the quality of the features they uncover remains challenging, and there is no consensus in the community about which benchmarks to use. Most evaluation procedures start by producing a single-sentence explanation for each feature in the sparse coder. These explanations are then evaluated based on how well they enable an LLM to predict the activation of a feature in new contexts. This method makes it difficult to disentangle the explanation generation and evaluation process from the actual interpretability of the features in the sparse coder. In this work, we adapt existing methods to assess the interpretability of sparse coders, with the advantage that they do not require generating natural language explanations as an intermediate step. This enables a more direct and potentially standardized assessment of interpretability. Furthermore, we compare the scores produced by our interpretability metrics with human evaluations across similar tasks and varying setups, offering suggestions for the community on improving the evaluation of these techniques.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 13305