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Elhage and colleagues: toy models of feature superposition

Contribution grade

Mechanistic interpretability · Human-designed AI research method or resource

Reference score22,000Provisional editorial estimate of this exact contribution; its grade is assessed separately.

What changed

Used sparse-feature synthetic data and small ReLU networks to demonstrate regimes in which models encode more features than available dimensions, with interpretable geometric changes as feature sparsity and importance vary.

Scientific scope

Used sparse-feature synthetic data and small ReLU networks to demonstrate regimes in which models encode more features than available dimensions, with interpretable geometric changes as feature sparsity and importance vary. Scope limitation: The findings concern specified toy networks and synthetic sparse features. They do not prove that any particular production language model uses the same geometry or that its internal features have been fully identified.

Evidence

The retained primary-source abstract, bibliographic record and stated review scope support this provisional assessment. No independent experimental replication by WRS is claimed. The findings concern specified toy networks and synthetic sparse features. They do not prove that any particular production language model uses the same geometry or that its internal features have been fully identified.

Contributors

Provisional WRS assessment, edition 2026-10-16.1. Independent expert calibration is pending. This grade does not certify correctness or assign ownership.

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