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Seven million eight hundred thousand commits later, detectors could rank AI agent commits above human ones, but at the real agent share their precision topped out at 33.2 percent

AspireAI community · arXiv
Using 7,837,946 commits from 1,226 repositories, a study strips the usual authorship signals from AI coding agent commits and asks whether agents can still be told apart from humans. Detectors still rank agent commits higher, reaching a ROC AUC of up to 0.859, but most of that signal comes from verbose commit messages and larger diffs rather than from the code itself, and at the agent share actually observed in the wild the best detector's precision tops out at 0.332 while transfer to held-out Claude Code and Copilot falls to an AUC of 0.524. The practical conclusion is that signature-free detection can triage commits for review but cannot replace recorded attribution, and that studies relying on bot-account or Co-authored-by labels are measuring a lower bound on agent activity.
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One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
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