English

A Mechanistic Investigation of Supervised Fine Tuning

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-13 v1

Abstract

The cosine similarity between a large language model's hidden activations before and after Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) remains very high. This, at first glance, suggests that SFT leaves the model's activation geometry largely undisturbed. However, projecting both sets of activations through a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) pretrained on the base model reveals that the underlying sparse latents diverge significantly. We introduce a novel investigative pipeline which utilizes these pretrained SAEs as a high-resolution diagnostic tool to mechanistically investigate the drivers of this representational divergence. Through our analytical pipeline, we discover task-specific and layer-specific distributions of the precise semantic features that are systematically altered during supervised fine-tuning. We additionally identify a layer-wise update profile specific to safety alignment. All code, experimental scripts, and analysis files associated with this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/ruhzi/sae-investigation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.11426,
  title  = {A Mechanistic Investigation of Supervised Fine Tuning},
  author = {Ruhaan Chopra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11426},
  year   = {2026}
}