Reference Feature Atlases for Mechanistic Auditing of Language Models

Abstract

arXiv:2607.22570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Auditing a new language model usually means relearning and reinterpreting its internal features from scratch. We propose a reference feature atlas: a sparse feature library trained once on a reference panel and reused for new targets, which attach by fitting only a linear decoder. This yields two complementary views. The atlas channel reads the target on already interpreted panel features, providing a stable coordinate system across models. The res