Alex Gulko


2025

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CE-Bench: Towards a Reliable Contrastive Evaluation Benchmark of Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders
Alex Gulko | Yusen Peng | Sachin Kumar
Proceedings of the 8th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce CE-Bench, a novel and lightweight contrastive evaluation benchmark for sparse autoencoders, built on a curated dataset of contrastive story pairs. We conduct comprehensive evaluation studies to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our results show that CE-Bench reliably measures the interpretability of sparse autoencoders and aligns well with existing benchmarks without requiring an external LLM judge, achieving over 70% Spearman correlation with results in SAEBench. The official implementation and evaluation dataset are open-sourced and publicly available.