On paper novelty, 18 models kept less than half their raw F1 after checking whether the evidence actually supported the claim, and GPT-5.5 scored 43-72 percent
AspireAI community · arXiv (cs.AI)
LLMs are already used in peer review at major AI conferences, but novelty assessment was previously scored as one holistic number, which hides which dimension a model misjudges and whether its evidence is faithful to what it says. NovGauge is a human-anchored benchmark of 619 paper pairs and 50 multi-paper sets drawn from two expert sources, ICLR reviewer overlap claims and survey co-citations, labeled independently along task, problem and method, with a cascading diagnostic pipeline that verifies per-dimension correctness, evidence grounding and logical support. Evaluation of 18 LLMs showed hallucination rates from 0 to 39 percent across dimensions, and among non-hallucinated correct-positive judgments more than 70 percent cited evidence that fails to logically support the stated reason; the best model, GPT-5.5, reached 43-72 percent Verified F1, with most models retaining less than half their raw F1 once faithfulness was verified. The limitation: the corpus is built from AI-conference review artifacts, so novelty judgements in other fields are untested, and the metric itself is built on human labels that carry their own subjectivity.
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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.