Sparse Transformer: a Controlled Testbed for Mechanistic Interpretability

Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to decompose neural network computations into human-understandable features, yet progress is limited by the absence of ground-truth units to evaluate against. We address this with a Sparse Transformer (ST): a 5-layer LLM trained on TinyStories whose wide, TopK-sparse MLP forces neuron specialization. We show that ST neurons are highly interpretable: they outperform a loss-matched dense transformer by 43% on AutoInterp, and circuits of a median of 12 neurons suffice to reproduce individual model predictions. This testbed allows us to directly compare feature learning methods: Transcoder, which approximates the MLP input-output mapping, recovers ST's neuron vectors with 52.6% higher cosine similarity than Sparse Autoencoder, which only reconstructs outputs. Furthermore, the ST enables a controlled study of polysemanticity: distilling its sparse MLP into a dense counterpart reveals how compression leads to feature superposition. These results show how a known reference basis sharpens evaluation and understanding, a role we hope the ST can serve for the field.