jbloomAus / SAELens

Training Sparse Autoencoders on Language Models
https://jbloomaus.github.io/SAELens/
MIT License
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chore: more flexible training losses #357

Closed chanind closed 2 weeks ago

chanind commented 2 weeks ago

Description

This PR refactors the TrainStepOutput in TrainingSAE.training_forward_pass() to allow passing losses as a dict rather than a hardcoded set of specific losses. The current implementation requires always providing values for ghost grad loss and auxiliary loss, even when it doesn't make sense for the training method. As SAELens supports more architectures, there will likely be more losses like this that only make sense for certain architectures, so it makes sense to let the train forward step define the losses that make sense for the circumstances.

This should also make it easier for researchers to hack on the SAELens SAEs since it means they can define any losses they want to track.

This PR also allows the losses to remain as tensors rather than being floats. The current implementation requires calling .item() on each loss, which forces a synchronization with the GPU and likely slows down training slightly. We only ever use the losses for logging, which happens by default once every 100 steps, so this synchronization is unnecessary.

Type of change

Please delete options that are not relevant.

Checklist:

You have tested formatting, typing and unit tests (acceptance tests not currently in use)

codecov[bot] commented 2 weeks ago

Codecov Report

Attention: Patch coverage is 90.90909% with 2 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Project coverage is 66.26%. Comparing base (8e09458) to head (beb2193). Report is 2 commits behind head on main.

Files with missing lines Patch % Lines
sae_lens/training/sae_trainer.py 80.00% 2 Missing :warning:
Additional details and impacted files ```diff @@ Coverage Diff @@ ## main #357 +/- ## ========================================== + Coverage 66.14% 66.26% +0.11% ========================================== Files 25 25 Lines 3373 3376 +3 Branches 432 432 ========================================== + Hits 2231 2237 +6 + Misses 1021 1019 -2 + Partials 121 120 -1 ```

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chanind commented 2 weeks ago

discussed / approved offline