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SAE Management

miLLM SAEs Page

A Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) must be attached to a model layer before steering or monitoring can work.

Downloading SAEs

  1. Navigate to SAEs in the sidebar
  2. Enter the SAE repository ID (e.g., google/gemma-scope-2b-pt-res)
  3. Click Preview to browse available SAE files
  4. Select one or more SAEs from the grouped file listing:
    • Files are grouped by layer and width
    • Each group shows dimensions (d_in × d_sae) and file size
    • Multi-select supported
  5. Click Download
Gemma-Scope SAEs

For Gemma 2 models, the recommended SAEs are from google/gemma-scope-*. Choose the matching model size (2b, 9b, 27b) and select a layer/width combination. Wider SAEs (16k, 131k) have more features but use more VRAM.

Attaching an SAE

Once downloaded, click Attach on any cached SAE. This:

  1. Loads the SAE weights to GPU
  2. Registers a forward hook on the specified model layer
  3. Locks the model to prevent accidental unloading
  4. Enables steering and monitoring capabilities

Only one SAE can be attached at a time. Detach the current SAE before attaching a different one.

SAE Information

Each SAE card displays:

  • d_in: Input dimension (must match model hidden dimension at the hooked layer)
  • d_sae: Latent dimension (number of features — this is the max feature index + 1)
  • Trained on: Which model the SAE was trained with
  • Layer: Which layer the SAE targets