Crosscoding Through Time: Tracking Emergence & Consolidation Of Linguistic Representations Throughout LLM Pretraining

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) learn non-trivial abstractions during pretraining, such as detecting irregular plural noun subjects. However, because traditional evaluation methods (e.g., benchmarking) fail to reveal how models acquire these concepts and capabilities, it is not well understood when and how these specific linguistic abilities emerge. To bridge this gap and better understand model training at the concept level, we use sparse crosscoders to discover and align features across model checkpoints. Using this approach, we track the evolution of linguistic features during pretraining. We train crosscoders between open-sourced checkpoint triplets with significant performance and representation shifts, and introduce a novel metric, Relative Indirect Effects (RelIE), to trace training stages at which individual features become causally important for task performance. We show that crosscoders can detect feature emergence, maintenance, and discontinuation during pretraining. Our approach is architecture-agnostic and scalable, offering a promising path toward more interpretable and fine-grained analysis of representation learning throughout pretraining.