Equation 9 · Part 3 · Probing, Sparse Autoencoders, Patching, and Steering: The Main Interpretability Methods, Compared
Symbol f
What this part means
f is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Its job in the formula
f is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.
Full expression→Symbol f→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The formal objective has evolved since the earliest versions, and the direction of that evolution is itself informative. A dictionary decoder reconstructs the activation x from a sparse code f(x) : . Earlier versions of this objective penalised the code’s norm as a differentiable stand-in for sparsity, but an penalty also shrinks the magnitude of every active feature, distorting reconstruction in a way that has nothing to do with how many features are…
Learn the underlying idea
A function assigns an output to each allowed input. The expression f(x) means “apply f to x”.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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