SuperActivators: Only the Tail of the Distribution Contains Reliable Concept Signals

Abstract: Concept vectors aim to enhance model interpretability by linking internal representations with human-understandable semantics, but their utility is often limited by noisy and inconsistent activations. In this work, we uncover a clear pattern within the noise, which we term the SuperActivator Mechanism: while in-concept and out-of-concept activations overlap considerably, the token activations in the extreme high tail of the in-concept distribution provide a reliable signal of concept presence. We demonstrate the generality of this mechanism by showing that SuperActivator tokens consistently outperform standard vector-based and prompting concept detection approaches, achieving up to a 14% higher F1 score across image and text modalities, model architectures, model layers, and concept extraction techniques. Finally, we leverage SuperActivator tokens to improve feature attributions for concepts.