A Geometric View for Understanding Concept Learning and Neuron Interpretation in Sparse Autoencoders

Abstract

We propose a unified mathematical framework for a geometric understanding of concept learning and neuron interpretation in sparse autoencoders (SAEs). While SAEs improve interpretability of neural networks by learning sparse feature representations, a principled definition of ''concept'' and ''learning'' remains unclear. We formalize concepts as sets of data points and cast concept learning as a set-alignment problem between human-defined and model-induced concepts. This formulation distinguishes three increasingly strong notions of learning -- detection, separation, and approximation -- and yields geometric conditions, error bounds, and capacity constraints for when concepts can be represented by individual neurons or multi-neuron units. It also provides a set-theoretic account for common SAE phenomena, including feature splitting, feature absorption, feature families, and hierarchical concepts. Finally, we connect concept learning and neuron interpretation through formal concept analysis, showing that the two directions need not agree and that their many-to-many structure can be organized by concept lattices. Experiments on synthetic data with ReLU and Top-$K$ SAEs illustrate the theory and reveal the effects of SAE size and sparsity on concept learning.