Yusen Peng

Alex Gulko, Yusen Peng, Sachin Kumar

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce CE-Bench, a novel and lightweight contrastive evaluation benchmark for sparse autoencoders, built on a curated dataset of contrastive story pairs. We conduct comprehensive evaluation studies to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our results show that CE-Bench reliably measures the interpretability of sparse autoencoders and aligns well with existing benchmarks without requiring an external LLM judge, achieving over 70% Spearman correlation with results in SAEBench. The official implementation and evaluation dataset are open-sourced and publicly available.

Yusen Peng, Shuhua Mao

How can AI move beyond imitation toward genuine creativity? This paper proposes the E.A.R.T.H. framework, a five-stage generative pipeline that transforms model-generated errors into creative assets through Error generation, Amplification, Refine selection, Transform, and Harness feedback. Drawing on cognitive science and generative modeling, we posit that "creative potential hides in failure" and operationalize this via structured prompts, semantic scoring, and human-in-the-loop evaluation. Implemented using LLaMA-2-7B-Chat, SBERT, BERTScore, CLIP, BLIP-2, and Stable Diffusion, the pipeline employs a composite reward function based on novelty, surprise, and relevance. At the Refine stage, creativity scores increase by 52.5% (1.179 to 1.898, t = -5.56, p < 0.001), with final outputs reaching 2.010 - a 70.4% improvement. Refined slogans are 48.4% shorter, 40.7% more novel, with only a 4.0% drop in relevance. Cross-modal tests show strong slogan-to-image alignment (CLIPScore: 0.249; BERTScore F1: 0.816). In human evaluations, the generated outputs were consistently rated highly, demonstrating strong creative quality and expressive clarity. Feedback highlights stylistic precision and emotional resonance. These results demonstrate that error-centered, feedback-driven generation enhances creativity, offering a scalable path toward self-evolving, human-aligned creative AI.