Abstract:Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are increasingly used to interpret language models, with auto-generated natural-language labels serving as the primary interface for understanding what each feature represents. We ask whether these labels generalize: does a feature labeled for a concept actually track that concept across languages and scripts? Using Serbian digraphia as a controlled testbed -- the same language written in both Latin and Cyrillic via deterministic transliteration -- we first find that SAE feature sets activated by the same content in different languages, scripts, and wordings share substantial overlap (peak Jaccard similarity 0.57 vs.\ 0.13 random baseline), suggesting genuine cross-lingual semantic features. We then test whether auto-interpretation labels keep pace. They often do not: features whose labels describe semantic content miss the same meaning in Serbian up to $4\times$ more often than within English, and miss Serbian Cyrillic more than Serbian Latin -- two scripts that are deterministic transliterations of each other -- suggesting the failures track how well each form is represented in training. The gap grows with network depth, yet the labels give no indication that they fail. These results suggest that auto-interpretation labels may reflect a feature's behavior on well-represented inputs rather than the concept itself.
Abstract:AI agents are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, including systems such as Manus, OpenClaw, and coding agents. Existing research has primarily focused on \emph{server-side} efficiency, proposing methods such as caching, speculative execution, traffic scheduling, and load balancing to reduce the cost of serving agentic workloads. However, as users increasingly construct agents by composing local tools, remote APIs, and diverse models, an equally important optimization problem arises on the client side. Client-side optimization asks how developers should allocate the resources available to them, including model choice, local tools, and API budget across pipeline stages, subject to application-specific quality, cost, and latency constraints. Because these objectives depend on the task and deployment setting, they cannot be determined by server-side systems alone. We introduce AgentOpt, the first framework-agnostic Python package for client-side agent optimization. We first study model selection, a high-impact optimization lever in multi-step agent pipelines. Given a pipeline and a small evaluation set, the goal is to find the most cost-effective assignment of models to pipeline roles. This problem is consequential in practice: at matched accuracy, the cost gap between the best and worst model combinations can reach 13--32$\times$ in our experiments. To efficiently explore the exponentially growing combination space, AgentOpt implements eight search algorithms, including Arm Elimination, Epsilon-LUCB, Threshold Successive Elimination, and Bayesian Optimization. Across four benchmarks, Arm Elimination recovers near-optimal accuracy while reducing evaluation budget by 24--67\% relative to brute-force search on three of four tasks. Code and benchmark results available at https://agentoptimizer.github.io/agentopt/.
Abstract:Do the features learned by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) represent abstract meaning, or are they tied to how text is written? We investigate this question using Serbian digraphia as a controlled testbed: Serbian is written interchangeably in Latin and Cyrillic scripts with a near-perfect character mapping between them, enabling us to vary orthography while holding meaning exactly constant. Crucially, these scripts are tokenized completely differently, sharing no tokens whatsoever. Analyzing SAE feature activations across the Gemma model family (270M-27B parameters), we find that identical sentences in different Serbian scripts activate highly overlapping features, far exceeding random baselines. Strikingly, changing script causes less representational divergence than paraphrasing within the same script, suggesting SAE features prioritize meaning over orthographic form. Cross-script cross-paraphrase comparisons provide evidence against memorization, as these combinations rarely co-occur in training data yet still exhibit substantial feature overlap. This script invariance strengthens with model scale. Taken together, our findings suggest that SAE features can capture semantics at a level of abstraction above surface tokenization, and we propose Serbian digraphia as a general evaluation paradigm for probing the abstractness of learned representations.