Cheng Lou(@_chenglou ):Can someone explain the intuition behind SAEs steering the activations instead of weights? Why would you steer the result instead of the controls? Is it purely to avoid the (arguably gigantic and hard to repro) messiness of retraining?

Cheng Lou

@_chenglou

Worked on: @reactjs, @messenger, @reasonml, @rescriptlang Currently: @midjourney, Pretext

Joined January 2015

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Cheng Lou@_chenglou

2026.05.07 22:31

Can someone explain the intuition behind SAEs steering the activations instead of weights? Why would you steer the result instead of the controls? Is it purely to avoid the (arguably gigantic and hard to repro) messiness of retraining?

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