Reward-Informed Sparse Autoencoders and the Solution-Completeness Confound

arXiv:2608.26136v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language-model activations into sparse, interpretable features, and an appealing way to aim them at reasoning is to curate their data with a signal reinforcement learning already produces: the reward.

We build such a reward-informed SAE (RI-SAE): we split GRPO trajectories into high-reward ("good") and low-reward ("bad") reasoning continuations, train a standard JumpReLU SAE on their activations, and then ask what the resulting good/bad separation actually measures.

On Llama-3.1-8B a sparse subset of the 16,384 features does separate the classes (silhouette 0.79 on the selected features versus 0.005 for the full code), but a control battery shows the separation is largely solution completeness rather than reasoning quality: a TF-IDF text classifier already splits the classes (AUC 0.75--0.83), and three structural cues alone (length, a closed reasoning block, and a boxed answer) reach AUC 0.70 (99% of good versus 69% of bad completions are boxed).

A generic SAE that never saw the reward does not separate the classes at all (silhouette 0.01, no discriminative features), so the 0.79 is in-sample fitting of this curated signal rather than structure that a reward-blind dictionary recovers.

We therefore present the recipe and its control battery together: reward filtering is a cheap, label-free way to reuse RL signals for interpretability, but most of what it surfaces is completion form. Two discriminative features are still readable (symbolic mathematics; procedural and evaluative language), which we take as illustrative rather than as isolated reasoning.