Reading Task Failure Off the Activations: A Sparse-Feature Audit of GPT-2 Small on Indirect Object Identification
We report a small, reproducible audit of which sparse-autoencoder (SAE) features of GPT-2 small fire differently on failed versus successful trials of the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. On 300 prompts, GPT-2 small reaches 79.7% accuracy; 146 of the 24,576 features in the layer-8 residual-stream SAE release of Bloom (2024) clear a Holm-corrected significance threshold and 105 reach a large effect size (|Cohen's d| > 0.8). The strongest single correlate of failure -- feature 17,491, d=+2.93, Neuronpedia label 'cryptographic keys' -- is essentially silent except when the prompt's transferred object is 'the keys,' on which GPT-2 small fails 93.3% of the time vs. 7.5% on the other ...
| Authors | Mahdi Nasermoghadasi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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