Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program—Autumn 2023 Cohort, under the mentorship of Dan Hendrycks

There was recently some work on sparse autoencoding of hidden LLM representation.

I checked if these sparse representations are better suited for classification. It seems like they are significantly worse. I summarize my negative results in this blogpost, code can be found on GitHub.

Introduction

Anthropic, Conjecture and other researchers have recently published some work on sparse autoencoding. The motivation is to push features towards monosemanticity to improve interpretability.

The basic concept is to project hidden layer activations to a higher dimensional space with sparse features. These sparse features are learned by training an autoencoder with sparsity constraints.

I had previously looked into how to use hidden layer activations for classification, steering and removal. I thought maybe sparse features could be better for these tasks as projecting features to a higher dimensional space can make them more easily linearly separable. Kind of like this (except sparser...):

Implementation

I use the pythia models (70m and 410m) together with the pretrained autoencoders from this work.

As the models are not super capable I use a very simple classification task. I take data from the IMDB review data set and filter for relatively short reviews.

To push the model towards classifying the review I apply a formatting prompt to each movie review:

format_prompt='Consider if following review is positive or negative:\n"{movie_review}"\nThe review is '

I encode the data and get the hidden representations for the last token (this contains the information of the whole sentence as I’m using left padding).

# pseudo code
tokenized_input = tokenizer(formatted_reviews)
output = model(**tokenized_input, output_hidden_states=True)
hidden_states = output["hidden_states"]
hidden_states = hidden_states[:, :, -1, :] # has shape (num_layers, num_samples, num_tokens, hidden_dim)

I train a logistic regression classifier and test it on the test set, to get some values for comparison.

I then apply the autoencoders to the hidden states (each layer has their respective autoencoder):

# pseudo code
for layer in layers:
	encoded[layer] = autoencoder[layer].encode(hidden_states[layer])
	decoded[layer] = autoencoder[layer].decode(encoded[layer])

Results

Reconstruction error

I don’t technically need the decoded states, but I wanted to do a sanity check first. I was a bit surprised by the large reconstruction error. Here are the mean squared errors and cosine similarities for Pythia-70m and Pythia-410m for different layers:

Reconstruction errors for pythia-70m-deduped:
MSE:
{1: 0.0309, 2: 0.0429, 3: 0.0556}
Cosine similarities:
{1: 0.9195, 2: 0.9371, 3: 0.9232}

Reconstruction errors pythia-410m-deduped:
MSE: {2: 0.0495, 4: 0.1052, 6: 0.1255, 8: 0.1452, 10: 0.1528, 12: 0.1179, 14: 0.121, 16: 0.111, 18: 0.1367, 20: 0.1793, 22: 0.2675, 23: 14.6385} 
Cosine similarities: {2: 0.8896, 4: 0.8728, 6: 0.8517, 8: 0.8268, 10: 0.8036, 12: 0.8471, 14: 0.8587, 16: 0.923, 18: 0.9445, 20: 0.9457, 22: 0.9071, 23: 0.8633}

However @Logan Riggs confirmed the MSE matched their results.

Test accuracy

So then I used the original hidden representations, and the encoded hidden representations respectively, to train logistic regression classifiers to differentiate between positive and negative reviews.

Here are the results for Pythia-70m and Pythia-410m^[1] on the test set:

So the sparse encodings consistently under-perform compared to the original hidden states.

Conclusion/Confusion

I’m not quite sure how to further interpret these results.

Are high-level features not encoded in the sparse representations?
- Previous work has mainly found good separation of pretty low level features...
Is it just this particular sentiment feature that is poorly encoded?
- This seems unlikely.
Did I make a mistake?
- The code that I adapted the autoencoder part from uses the transformer-lens library to get the hidden states. I just use the standard implementation since I’m just looking at the residual stream… I checked the hidden states produced with transformer-lens: they are slightly different but give similar accuracies. I’m not entirely sure how well transformer-lens deals with left padding and batch processing though...

Due to this negative result I did not further explore steering or removal with sparse representations.

Thanks to @Hoagy and @Logan Riggs for answering some questions I had and for pointing me to relevant code and pre-trained models.

^
I could not consistently load the same configuration for all layers, that’s why I only got results for a few layers.

Classifying representations of sparse autoencoders (SAEs)