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Abstract - Cross-seed explainability using Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoders
We present a Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) for extracting cross-seed universal features from independently trained BERT models. Cross-seed feature universality is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability: because dictionary learning is non-convex, independently trained networks learn misaligned feature spaces, so apparently identical features may differ by random initialization. We address this by computing an orthogonal Procrustes rotation between seeds' activation spaces before joint SAE training, combining Top-K sparsity, end-to-end downstream optimization, and an auxiliary dead-feature revival loss based on previous SAE literature. Evaluating on five independent seed pairs (ten BERT models) across three benchmark datasets (SST-2, Stanford Politeness, TweetEval Emotion), our full pipeline produces more universal features (Pearson r $\geq$ 0.70 across seeds) than post-hoc alignment baselines on all three datasets. A minimal qualitative analysis confirms that high-universality features encode interpretable sociolinguistic patterns.
基于Procrustes条件联合端到端Top-K稀疏自编码器的跨随机种子可解释性研究 /
Cross-seed explainability using Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoders
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本研究提出了一种新方法,通过先对齐不同随机初始化的BERT模型内部表示空间(使用Procrustes旋转),再联合训练稀疏自编码器,从而提取出跨不同训练实例的通用可解释特征,显著优于传统后处理对齐方法,并在情感分析、礼貌性和情感识别等任务中验证了其有效性。