arXiv AI By Yi Jing, Zao Dai, Jinwu Hu, Zijun Yao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Xiaozhi Wang

Teach the Way It Thinks: Guiding LLM Post-training Data Engineering with Sparse Autoencoders

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The paper introduces SAERL, a method that uses Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to guide reinforcement learning data engineering for large language models. By mapping training samples into a feature space of interpretable SAE activations, SAERL selects samples with strong, non‑redundant gradient signals, organizes functional regions from easy to hard, and batches from single activation clusters with moderate mixing. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks show consistent performance gains across model scales and RL algorithms, with notable improvements on Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B.

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