Been really enjoying unfaithful CoT research with collaborators recently. Two observations:

1) Quickly it's clear that models are sneaking in reasoning without verbalising where it comes from (e.g. making an equation that gets the correct answer, but defined out of thin air)

We scaled training data attribution (TDA) methods ~1000x to find influential pretraining examples for thousands of queries in an 8B-parameter LLM over the entire 160B-token C4 corpus!
medium.com/people-ai-re...

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are popular, with 10+ new approaches proposed in the last year. How do we know if we are making progress? The field has relied on imperfect proxy metrics.

We are releasing SAE Bench, a suite of 8 SAE evaluations!

Project co-led with Adam Karvonen.

Currently, most of our SAE evaluations don't fully capture what we want, and are very expensive

This work provides a battery of automated metrics that should help researchers understand their SAEs' strengths and weaknesses better: www.neuronpedia.org/sae-bench/info

Please report @deep-mind.bsky.social: it is not the real DeepMind, which would obviously use the google.com or deepmind.google domains rather than one they bought off GoDaddy 3 days ago: uk.godaddy.com/whois/result...

I'm very bullish on automated research engineering soon, but even I was surprised that AI agents are twice as good as humans with 5+ years of experience or from a top AGI or safety lab at doing tasks in 2 hours. Paper: metr.org/AI_R_D_Evalu...