SAEScientist-Bench: Can AI Agents Conduct Autonomous SAE Interpretability Research?
SAEScientist-Bench evaluates whether AI agents can autonomously conduct SAE interpretability research in Gemma-2-9B-IT, finding frontier agents trail expert baselines.
SAEScientist-Bench tests if AI agents can act as scientists using SAE tools for autonomous mechanistic discovery, requiring them to design contrastive probes and navigate a Gemma Scope dictionary of 131K+ features in Gemma-2-9B-IT. Across 10 agent configurations and 20 tasks, frontier agents showed genuine discovery capability but remained well behind expert reference features, lagging most in causal steering. Agents frequently misinterpreted experimental measurements even when designing effective contrasts.
55