A is for Absorption: Studying Feature Splitting and Absorption in Sparse Autoencoders

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach to decompose the activations of Large Language Models (LLMs) into human-interpretable features. In this paper, we pose two questions. First, to what extent do SAEs extract monosemantic and interpretable features? Second, to what extent does varying the sparsity or the size of the SAE affect monosemanticity / interpretability? By investigating these questions in the context of a simple first-letter identification task, where we have complete access to ground truth labels for all tokens in the vocabulary, we are able to provide more detail than prior investigations. Critically, we identify a problematic form of feature-splitting we call “feature absorption” where seemingly monosemantic latents fail to fire in cases where they clearly should. Our investigation suggests that varying SAE size or sparsity is insufficient to solve this issue, and that there are deeper conceptual issues in need of resolution. We release a feature absorption explorer at https://feature-absorption.streamlit.app.