← All parts of this equation

Equation 13 · Part 1 · How Mechanistic Interpretability Research Is Actually Done

Symbol z

z=TopKk ⁣(Wenc(a−bdec)),z = \mathrm{TopK}_k\!\left(W_{\mathrm{enc}}(a - b_{\mathrm{dec}})\right),
zz

What this part means

z is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

Its job in the formula

z is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

The passage around this formula

The ℓ1\ell_1 penalty has a known cost: it does not directly control how many dictionary elements fire, only how much their combined magnitude is discouraged, and it systematically shrinks the elements that do fire toward zero, biasing the reconstruction. Two later refinements address this more directly. Gao and colleagues introduced k -sparse encoding, which drops the tunable penalty in favour of a fixed sparsity budget enforced structurally, z=TopKk ⁣(Wenc(a−bdec))z = \mathrm{TopK}_k\!\left(W_{\mathrm{enc}}(a - b_{\mathrm{dec}})\right). keeping only the k largest pre-activations and zeroing the rest, and used it to train a sixteen-million-latent dictionary on GPT-4 activations over forty billion tokens, reporting metrics that improve consistently as dictionary size…

Read this part in the article →

Learn the underlying idea

A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

Open the illustrated variables: a letter stands for a value guide →

See this notation across published equations →

Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.