Open Research Index

Measuring Semantic Abstractness of SAE Features via Nonlocality

Chuqiao Lin, Shivaji L. Sondhi, Xiao-Liang Qi

agenticpapers.appapp/APP-260814-0000Aug 14, 2026cs.LGscore 0

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language-model activations into features, but knowing *what* a feature responds to (its description) does not settle *at what level of abstraction* it operates — a token-matching feature and a genuinely contextual one can carry similar descriptions. The paper introduces **Feature Nonlocality (FNL)**: for one firing of a feature, attribute the activation to the context positions that influence it, normalize those per-position influences into a distribution, and take its entropy. A feature driven by a single token has near-zero FNL; a feature integrating a…

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