Strength Controls Change How Interventions Compare Across Sparse Autoencoder Codes
Changing sparse autoencoder (SAE) codes can alter both intervention direction and magnitude, so comparing intervention effects requires a strength control specifying what is held equal. Norm matching and output calibration provide different controls, but whether interventions yield different effects across codes after strength matching remains unclear. We compare intervention effects under these controls for fixed feature groups in Gemma and Llama and observe: (1) Whole-patch scaling. With one coefficient per input, full-output Kullback-Leibler (KL) calibration leaves smaller mean effect gaps from the encoder-based reference intervention than total-norm matching for nonnegative least-squa...
| Authors | Jinchen Zhang, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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