Scaling Laws for SAE Training Data
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are usually trained on hundreds of millions to billions of activation tokens, but this study shows that the amount of data needed depends on the evaluation metric. Training four SAE architectures on three language models with token budgets from 5 M to 500 M revealed that reconstruction quality can reach near‑full‑data performance with far fewer tokens, while one‑to‑one feature reproducibility continues to improve as more data is used. The research also found that random sampling preserves activation distributions better for reconstruction, whereas diversity‑based sampling can enhance feature interpretability, and provided a theoretical framework distinguishing statistical consistency from the stricter conditions needed for exact feature recovery.
arXiv:2606. 01155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws for dense LLMs under infinite data are well explored, but how sparsity interacts with limited data is not.
arXiv:2606. 14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK.
arXiv:2608. 14071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models scale, their training-token budgets must also increase to maintain an appropriate tokens-per-parameter ratio (\(\mathrm{TPP}\)).
arXiv:2607. 25271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classical compute-optimal scaling laws assume an unbounded supply of fresh pretraining data, yet pretraining is increasingly entering a regime in which compute grows faster than the availability of high-quality data.
arXiv:2508. 16560v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract features from LLM internal activations, meant to correspond to interpretable concepts.