There is a view that SAE features are just a useful tool for describing activations (interpretable features) and manipulating activations (useful for steering and probing). That SAEs are just a particularly good method in a larger class of methods, but not uniquely principled. In that case I wouldn’t expect this connection to model behaviour.
But often we make the claim that we often make is that the model sees and understands the world as a set of model-features, and that we can see the same features by looking at SAE-features of the activations. And then I want to see the extra evidence.
There is a view that SAE features are just a useful tool for describing activations (interpretable features) and manipulating activations (useful for steering and probing). That SAEs are just a particularly good method in a larger class of methods, but not uniquely principled. In that case I wouldn’t expect this connection to model behaviour.
But often we make the claim that we often make is that the model sees and understands the world as a set of model-features, and that we can see the same features by looking at SAE-features of the activations. And then I want to see the extra evidence.