caiovicentino1/openinterp-psae-v15-marginal-fit-pathology
PSAE v1.5 — Marginal-Fit Pathology Honest-Negative Reproducibility artifacts for the paper The Marginal-Fit Pathology in Predictive SAE Feature Trajectory Probes (workshop submission, NeurIPS MI Workshop 2026). TL;DR: We trained linear probes on Qwen3.6-27B residuals to predict end-of-thinking SAE features from earlier-thinking residuals across L11/L31/L55. Naive recall@1024 = 0.83-0.87 looked paper-grade. The shuffled-source baseline B1 reproduces this within ±0.03 at all 12… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/caiovicentino1/openinterp-psae-v15-marginal-fit-pathology.
PSAE v1.5 — Marginal-Fit Pathology Honest-Negative
Reproducibility artifacts for the paper The Marginal-Fit Pathology in Predictive SAE Feature Trajectory Probes (workshop submission, NeurIPS MI Workshop 2026).
TL;DR: We trained linear probes on Qwen3.6-27B residuals to predict end-of-thinking SAE features from earlier-thinking residuals across L11/L31/L55. Naive recall@1024 = 0.83-0.87 looked paper-grade. The shuffled-source baseline B1 reproduces this within ±0.03 at all 12 sites. The trivial constant baseline B2 ("predict the top-M most-common features in train, ignore input") reaches recall@1024 = 1.000 at L11/L31 — strictly exceeding the trained probe. The predictive claim does not survive.
Contents
Reproduction
import torch
residuals = torch.load("cache/residuals_multilayer.pt", weights_only=False)
features = torch.load("cache/features_multilayer.pt", weights_only=False)
# residuals[L][frac] = Tensor[N=133, d_model=5120]
# features[L][1.00]['indices'] = Tensor[N=133, k=128] ← targetThe SAE encoder weights live in `caiovicentino1/qwen36-27b-sae-papergrade`.
The two notebooks that produced these results:
nb_predictive_sae_v1.ipynb— original REAL trainingnb_predictive_sae_v15_baseline.ipynb— B0 + B1 baselines (this paper)
Both are in OpenInterpretability/openinterp.
Citation
@misc{openinterp-psae-v15-marginal-fit-pathology-2026,
author = {Vicentino, Caio},
title = {The Marginal-Fit Pathology in Predictive SAE Feature
Trajectory Probes},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/caiovicentino1/openinterp-psae-v15-marginal-fit-pathology}
}Part of the OpenInterpretability honest-negative methodology series. Sibling papers: Two Forms of Epiphenomenal Probes in Code Agents, Saturation-Direction Lever: A Five-Class Taxonomy of Probe Causality.
