Intensive Teaching · October 2026

The most important things

Before: Join the Iliad Discord and check you can see #intensive-october. That is where you post any material you need to share with participants. If you can't see it, tell Leonard (@leonardbereska on Discord).
During: At 17:10, make sure everyone fills out the feedback form.
After: Fill out the end-of-day log: rate the day and tell us anything that went wrong.
Fill out Who stood out: name anyone who made a positive impression.

66 project proposals are open for review. Stars, a sentence, or both. Read them.

Your days

SAEs and Activation Geometry Thu 29 Oct, seconding 25 responses · energy 4.1/5

Overall +0.63 better than expected n = 24

Content +0.54 better than expected n = 24

Clarity +0.46 better than expected n = 24

Motivation +0.54 better than expected n = 24

Exercises 0.00 as expected n = 9

Readings -0.17 as expected n = 12

Other activities +0.13 as expected n = 8

Pace -0.04 about right n = 24

Difficulty 0.00 about right n = 24

Novelty +0.38 mostly new n = 24

Read what they wrote21

Worked well7

Eric's presentation was very well prepared.
The guest lecturers
interesting topics and well explained
I had a lot of common interest and similar research taste as the teachers, I enjoyed a lot the lessons.
The supplemental readings were a nice touch
The slides had lot of concrete examples of what was being described, something that was missing on the other days.
Excellent speakers.

Would improve8

Both lectures were well structures and well presented. I personally liked both sessions because several emperical results were discussed. For future iliad I would dedicate one day for each lecture with more exercises to practive. This might make physics people more happy :)
Some exercise sessions would have helped.
Maybe some more exercises
very good day nothing
nothing to improve, all very good !
I would have included this module much earlier in the course as it provided some insight into how to explore activations in a structured manner. It was only implied/inferred from the material on other days.
Nothing to improve today. The presentation was great -- lots of nice pictures and well-explained what the concepts we were discussing exactly were!
Great talks! Not that much interaction, though. I feel like having a moment to discuss some topics with a neighbour, or a moment to do a quick quiz or something like that, would be a good activating intermediate activity.

Changed my mind6

Sparse auto encoders seem less useful than I expected.
nothing really just learned a bunch of stuff
I migth have moved the work today to earlier in the month, so that it was shortly after covering SAEs
Not much change in opinion, had already seen much of the material before
I didn't particularly change my mind. I was already interested in the possibility of concepts being represented on submanifolds of the activation space, but my interest was reaffirmed and heightened after seeing this presentation.
I did not realise some people consider today's topic as the most (only?) important set of problems. I updated my priors accordingly.

The day

10:00 Lecture starts

12:30 Lunch at Mox

13:30 Afternoon session

17:10 Feedback form

17:30 Day ends. Dinner

Resources

Elsewhere