It is found that methodological variance collectively exceeds architectural variance across all metrics and tested models, suggesting that cross-paper comparisons based on autointerpretability scores may reflect pipeline differences rather than architectural differences, with implications for the ongoing debate on SAE utility.
Abstract
Cross-paper comparison of sparse autoencoder (SAE) interpretability often relies on autointerpretability scores. In this evaluation pipeline, a language model (LM) explains each feature, and another LM scores the explanation. For these comparisons to be meaningful, scores must reflect stable properties of the features rather than confounding aspects of the evaluation pipeline. Through systematic experiments across four metrics (simulation, detection, fuzzing, purity), two models (Pythia-160M, Apertus-8B), and four axes of methodological variation, we show that this assumption does not hold. Specifically, we find that R1) methodological variance collectively exceeds architectural variance across all metrics and tested models; R2) each metric exhibits a distinct instability profile, with detection being the most stable and fuzzing unreliable across all conditions; R3) top-k feature rankings do not stay consistent across corpus and draw conditions, masking per-feature instability behind stable mean scores; a failure that cannot be detected by monitoring explanation similarity alone. These findings suggest that cross-paper comparisons based on autointerpretability scores may reflect pipeline differences rather than architectural differences, with implications for the ongoing debate on SAE utility. More broadly, unreliable evaluation slows progress in interpretability research at a time when reliable tools for understanding AI systems are needed. To support evaluation, we contribute a variance decomposition approach, a Stability Check, and a Minimum Reporting Checklist.
The results show that the LLM's capability dissolves with dimension in a way no noise-corrupted classical learner mimics - which explains why LLMs, so capable elsewhere, keep losing to fifty-year-old baselines on tables, while leaving the mechanism of the prediction as an open question.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are improving rapidly, but benchmark development lags behind, making weaknesses hard to identify. Building stress tests is costly: samples must satisfy controlled conditions, remain answerable, and challenge current models. We present SABRE, a scalable, automated pipeline that converts a Test Primer (a Markdown Task Design with Data Schema) into structured specifications, generated or edited images, and question-answer pairs. Automated filtering removes candidates solved by a Filtering VLM, while human review verifies candidate validity and supports annotation correction and localized image repair. We instantiate SABRE-Prior to test whether VLMs follow visual evidence instead of relying on world priors -- learned expectations about familiar objects and scenes. Its 600 images and 1,000 questions span Context (unexpected entities in familiar scenes), Texture (counterfactual materials), Attribute (noncanonical component counts), and Language Elicitation (answers suggested by language but unsupported by the image). Across six VLMs, macro-average accuracy ranges from 17.8% to 31.3% (22.6% mean). A real-image Attribute control is comparably difficult for the Filtering VLM. SABRE-Counting and SABRE-Spatial pilots show that the workflow supports other stress-test settings. These results establish SABRE as a reusable framework for constructing and refreshing VLM stress tests rather than a single fixed benchmark.
Zixuan Lan, Luzhe Sun, Matthew R. Walter et al.· 0 citations
An integrated conceptual frame-work that couples attention- and perturbation-based explainability with lightweight hallucination-detection signals and token-efficient inference strategies is presented, and a set of cross-cutting consistency metrics are instrumented with a set of cross-cutting consistency metrics.
Sakshi Parate, Shreyans Sanyal· Advanced International Journ...· 0 citations
Do large language models contain domain-specific parametric shells: concentrated, causally necessary neuron populations whose removal selectively degrades a target domain while sparing others? We apply a uniform causal methodology across two domain granularities, three model families (1.5B to 7B parameters), and eight domains. At the academic subject level, zero neurons exceed 60\% domain selectivity across 939,008 combined FFN neurons and causal damage matrices are flat, despite domain identity being linearly decodable above 85\% accuracy. At the language and modality level, 0.65--1.14\% of neurons exceed 60\% selectivity, damage matrices are near-perfectly diagonal (ratios up to 595:1), and shell neuron sets are essentially disjoint (IoU $<0.003$). Masking code-selective neurons reduces mathematical reasoning accuracy by 16--24 percentage points across all models; masking Spanish or Chinese neurons leaves it at or below random. Shell strength increases monotonically with scale and shells are spatially interleaved in a pattern that precludes group-level selective quantization. Parametric shells form where and only where training data was modular at the token level.
M. Armstrong, Navid Ayoobi, Arjun Mukherjee· 0 citations
Recent document parsers achieve table TEDS scores above 93 on OmniDocBench v1.6, yet community feedback and our audit reveal persistent failures on complex real-world tables. To quantify this gap, we introduce TableParseMap, a diagnostic benchmark of 916 real-world tables organized into five challenging scenarios and nine failure types. The strongest evaluated parser achieves only 85.03 TEDS, showing that aggregate benchmark scores conceal substantial weaknesses. Our analysis attributes these failures to three complementary limitations: large tables exceed the reliable processing scale of a single pass, weak or ambiguous visual cues hinder structure perception, and the reconstructed table may remain visually inconsistent with the image. We therefore propose DEC (Decompose--Enhance--Correct), a visual-consistency-guided agentic framework that improves frozen table parsers without retraining. DEC uses a general VLM as the controller: Decompose partitions large tables along structure-aware boundaries, Enhance exposes weak visual evidence and reparses transformed views, and Correct diagnoses and repairs residual errors. A Visual Consistency Gate (VC-Gate) selectively triggers intervention, while a Visual Consistency Ranker (VC-Ranker) verifies candidate updates and supports rollback without ground-truth HTML at inference time. We further derive a 1,977-table Consensus-Hard Set from 4,556 candidates through offline metrics and cross-model consensus. Across three frozen parsers, DEC improves TEDS by 1.57 points on average; on TableParseMap, gains reach 1.89 points overall, 2.62 on structural errors, and 5.66 on large tables.
Jutao Xiao, Yuan Qu, Dongsheng Ma et al.· 0 citations