Datasets:

basta
/

spar-concepts

concept string	prompt string	target int64
positive_sentiment	Safe Conduct , however ambitious and well-intentioned , fails to hit the entertainment bull 's - eye .	0
positive_sentiment	It 's an experience in understanding a unique culture that is presented with universal appeal .	1
positive_sentiment	Even if Britney Spears is really cute , her movie is really bad .	0
positive_sentiment	All right , so it 's not a brilliant piece of filmmaking , but it is a funny ( sometimes hilarious ) comedy with a deft sense of humor about itself , a playful spirit and a game cast .	1
positive_sentiment	Fans of Behan 's work and of Irish movies in general will be rewarded by Borstal Boy .	1
positive_sentiment	A bittersweet contemporary comedy about benevolent deception , which , while it may not rival the filmmaker 's period pieces , is still very much worth seeing .	1
positive_sentiment	All in all , Brown Sugar is a satisfying well-made romantic comedy that 's both charming and well acted .	1
positive_sentiment	The storylines are woven together skilfully , the magnificent swooping aerial shots are breathtaking , and the overall experience is awesome .	1
positive_sentiment	Scores no points for originality , wit , or intelligence .	0
positive_sentiment	As the sulking , moody male hustler in the title role , ( Franco ) has all of Dean 's mannerisms and self-indulgence , but none of his sweetness and vulnerability .	0
positive_sentiment	A decent-enough nail-biter that stands a good chance of being the big hit Franklin needs to stay afloat in Hollywood .	1
positive_sentiment	Credibility levels are low and character development a non-starter .	0
positive_sentiment	Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute .	0
positive_sentiment	... one of the more influential works of the ` Korean New Wave ' .	1
positive_sentiment	Nothing more than four or five mild chuckles surrounded by 86 minutes of overly-familiar and poorly-constructed comedy .	0
positive_sentiment	It gets old quickly .	0
positive_sentiment	In fact , it does n't even seem like she tried .	0
positive_sentiment	It 's a spectacular performance - ahem , we hope it 's only acting .	1
positive_sentiment	At once subtle and visceral , the film never succumbs to the trap of the maudlin or tearful , offering instead with its unflinching gaze a measure of faith in the future .	1
positive_sentiment	A movie of riveting power and sadness .	1
positive_sentiment	A soggy , shapeless mess ... just a dumb excuse for a waterlogged equivalent of a haunted-house movie .	0
positive_sentiment	This miserable excuse of a movie runs on empty , believing Flatbush machismo will get it through .	0
positive_sentiment	The obnoxious special effects , the obligatory outbursts of flatulence and the incessant , so-five-minutes-ago pop music on the soundtrack overwhelm what is left of the scruffy , dopey old Hanna-Barbera charm .	0
positive_sentiment	... the movie is just a plain old monster .	0
positive_sentiment	What 's most striking about this largely celebratory film ... is the sense of isolation that permeates these bastions of individuality in an Ikea world .	1
positive_sentiment	It 's Splash without the jokes .	0
positive_sentiment	` Stock up on silver bullets for director Neil Marshall 's intense freight train of a film . '	1
positive_sentiment	The movie is ingenious fun .	1
positive_sentiment	The major problem with Windtalkers is that the bulk of the movie centers on the wrong character .	0
positive_sentiment	Ignore the reputation , and ignore the film .	0
positive_sentiment	A very long movie , dull in stretches , with entirely too much focus on meal preparation and igloo construction .	0
positive_sentiment	Ryan Gosling is , in a word , brilliant as the conflicted Daniel .	1
positive_sentiment	The camera soars above the globe in dazzling panoramic shots that make the most of the large-screen format , before swooping down on a string of exotic locales , scooping the whole world up in a joyous communal festival of rhythm .	1
positive_sentiment	a bilingual charmer , just like the woman who inspired it	1
positive_sentiment	A wonderfully speculative character study that made up for its rather slow beginning by drawing me into the picture .	1
positive_sentiment	Trite , banal , cliched , mostly inoffensive .	0
positive_sentiment	Where 's the movie here ?	0
positive_sentiment	Koepp 's screenplay is n't nearly surprising or clever enough to sustain a reasonable degree of suspense on its own .	0
positive_sentiment	The subject of swinging still seems ripe for a documentary -- just not this one .	0
positive_sentiment	Director Yu seems far more interested in gross-out humor than in showing us well-thought stunts or a car chase that we have n't seen 10,000 times .	0
positive_sentiment	Despite suffering a sense-of-humour failure , The Man Who Wrote Rocky does not deserve to go down with a ship as leaky as this .	0
positive_sentiment	So much about the film is loopy and ludicrous ... that it could have been a hoot in a bad-movie way if the laborious pacing and endless exposition had been tightened .	0
positive_sentiment	Shatner is probably the funniest person in the film , which gives you an idea just how bad it was .	0
positive_sentiment	wo n't be placed in the pantheon of the best of the swashbucklers but it is a whole lot of fun and you get to see the one of the world 's best actors , Daniel Auteuil , have a whale of a good time .	1
positive_sentiment	It 's a clear-eyed portrait of an intensely lived time , filled with nervous energy , moral ambiguity and great uncertainties .	1
positive_sentiment	Every time you look , Sweet Home Alabama is taking another bummer of a wrong turn .	0
positive_sentiment	Greg Kinnear gives a mesmerizing performance as a full-fledged sex addict who is in complete denial about his obsessive behavior .	1
positive_sentiment	Though in some ways similar to Catherine Breillat 's Fat Girl , Rain is the far superior film .	1
positive_sentiment	Totally overwrought , deeply biased , and wholly designed to make you feel guilty about ignoring what the filmmakers clearly believe are The Greatest Musicians of All Time .	0
positive_sentiment	A loud , brash and mainly unfunny high school comedy .	0
positive_sentiment	It 's not just a feel-good movie , it 's a feel movie .	1
positive_sentiment	The animated subplot keenly depicts the inner struggles of our adolescent heroes - insecure , uncontrolled , and intense .	1
positive_sentiment	The Komediant is a tale worth catching .	1
positive_sentiment	A good film with a solid pedigree both in front of and , more specifically , behind the camera .	1
positive_sentiment	As an introduction to the man 's theories and influence , Derrida is all but useless ; as a portrait of the artist as an endlessly inquisitive old man , however , it 's invaluable .	1
positive_sentiment	Viewers of Barney 's crushingly self-indulgent spectacle will see nothing in it to match the ordeal of sitting through it .	0
positive_sentiment	Russell lacks the visual panache , the comic touch , and perhaps the budget of Sommers 's title-bout features .	0
positive_sentiment	Perhaps the best sports movie I 've ever seen .	1
positive_sentiment	In the new release of Cinema Paradiso , the tale has turned from sweet to bittersweet , and when the tears come during that final , beautiful scene , they finally feel absolutely earned .	1
positive_sentiment	The most amazing super-sized dosage of goofball stunts any `` Jackass '' fan could want .	1
positive_sentiment	It 's really yet another anemic and formulaic Lethal Weapon-derived buddy-cop movie , trying to pass off its lack of imagination as hip knowingness .	0
positive_sentiment	One-sided documentary offers simplistic explanations to a very complex situation .	0
positive_sentiment	But Toback 's deranged immediacy makes it seem fresh again .	1
positive_sentiment	It 's loud and boring ; watching it is like being trapped at a bad rock concert .	0
positive_sentiment	Flashy gadgets and whirling fight sequences may look cool , but they ca n't distract from the flawed support structure holding Equilibrium up .	0
positive_sentiment	It 's usually a bad sign when directors abandon their scripts and go where the moment takes them , but Olympia , Wash. , based filmmakers Anne de Marcken and Marilyn Freeman did just that and it 's what makes their project so interesting .	1
positive_sentiment	Until its final minutes this is a perceptive study of two families in crisis -- and of two girls whose friendship is severely tested by bad luck and their own immaturity .	0
positive_sentiment	Even if you do n't know the band or the album 's songs by heart , you will enjoy seeing how both evolve , and you will also learn a good deal about the state of the music business in the 21st Century .	1
positive_sentiment	Priggish , lethargically paced parable of renewal .	0
positive_sentiment	It never fails to engage us .	1
positive_sentiment	The far future may be awesome to consider , but from period detail to matters of the heart , this film is most transporting when it stays put in the past .	1
positive_sentiment	Art-house to the core , Read My Lips is a genre-curling crime story that revives the free-wheeling noir spirit of old French cinema .	1
positive_sentiment	This film was made to get laughs from the slowest person in the audience -- just pure slapstick with lots of inane , inoffensive screaming and exaggerated facial expressions .	0
positive_sentiment	If you go into the theater expecting a scary , action-packed chiller , you might soon be looking for a sign .	0
positive_sentiment	Gives everyone something to shout about .	1
positive_sentiment	Bartleby is a one-joke movie , and a bad joke at that .	0
positive_sentiment	Like all of Egoyan 's work , Ararat is fiercely intelligent and uncommonly ambitious .	1
positive_sentiment	What 's most refreshing about Real Women Have Curves is its unforced comedy-drama and its relaxed , natural-seeming actors .	1
positive_sentiment	Nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing .	0
positive_sentiment	Skip this turd and pick your nose instead because you 're sure to get more out of the latter experience .	0
positive_sentiment	Divertingly ridiculous , headbangingly noisy .	0
positive_sentiment	The history is fascinating ; the action is dazzling .	1
positive_sentiment	The uneven movie does have its charms and its funny moments but not quite enough of them .	0
positive_sentiment	The film , while not exactly assured in its execution , is notable for its sheer audacity and openness .	1
positive_sentiment	... once the true impact of the day unfolds , the power of this movie is undeniable .	1
positive_sentiment	Though it 's not very well shot or composed or edited , the score is too insistent and the dialogue is frequently overwrought and crudely literal , the film shatters you in waves .	0
positive_sentiment	The Master of Disguise represents Adam Sandler 's latest attempt to dumb down the universe .	0
positive_sentiment	Barney 's ideas about creation and identity do n't really seem all that profound , at least by way of what can be gleaned from this three-hour endurance test built around an hour 's worth of actual material .	0
positive_sentiment	Imagine a film that begins as a Seven rip-off , only to switch to a mix of The Shining , The Thing , and any naked teenagers horror flick from the 1980s .	0
positive_sentiment	A ` Girls Gone Wild ' video for the boho art-house crowd , The Burning Sensation is n't a definitive counter-cultural document -- its makers are n't removed and inquisitive enough for that .	0
positive_sentiment	works on the whodunit level as its larger themes get lost in the murk of its own making	0
positive_sentiment	While it 's nothing we have n't seen before from Murphy , I Spy is still fun and enjoyable and so aggressively silly that it 's more than a worthwhile effort .	1
positive_sentiment	Time stands still in more ways that one in Clockstoppers , a sci-fi thriller as lazy as it is interminable .	0
positive_sentiment	Audiard successfully maintains suspense on different levels throughout a film that is both gripping and compelling .	1
positive_sentiment	Even on its own ludicrous terms , The Sum of All Fears generates little narrative momentum , and invites unflattering comparisons to other installments in the Ryan series .	0
positive_sentiment	The banter between Calvin and his fellow barbers feels like a streetwise McLaughlin Group ... and never fails to entertain .	1
positive_sentiment	The screenplay is hugely overwritten , with tons and tons of dialogue -- most of it given to children .	0
positive_sentiment	Kudos to the most enchanting film of the year .	1
positive_sentiment	Because the intelligence level of the characters must be low , very low , very very low , for the masquerade to work , the movie contains no wit , only labored gags .	0
positive_sentiment	It wants to tweak them with a taste of tangy new humor .	1

End of preview. Expand in Data Studio

SPAR steering concepts

Contrastive texts for building steering directions, used by the SPAR project for the GLP steering evals and for training and evaluating the cold-diffusion model. A concept is a set of positive texts (target=1, concept present) and negative texts (target=0, concept absent); its steering direction is the diff-of-means of a model's activations on the two classes, exactly as in the GLP sentiment eval.

39 concepts: 6 held-out eval concepts and 33 train concepts for cold diffusion, in 7 families (topic, emotion, language, style, sentiment, toxicity, format). All texts are natural (human-written) text from labeled public datasets. Many train concepts are the steerable subset of the SAE-Probes collection (Kantamneni et al. 2025, "Are Sparse Autoencoders Useful? A Case Study in Sparse Probing"), rebuilt from the original sources.

Configs

config	rows	content
`texts`	train 512 + 512, test 500 + 500 per concept (formality: test 218 + 218)	`concept`, `prompt`, `target`. Train builds the direction, test measures held-out AUROC.
`concepts`	one per concept	`family`, `judge_description` (the exact `<concept>` string for the AxBench judge), `concept_split`, source and selection rules, `notes`
`prefixes`	100	neutral OpenWebText prefixes the steered generations continue (from the GLP sentiment eval)

from datasets import load_dataset
texts = load_dataset("basta/spar-concepts", "texts", split="train")

concept_split is a split over concepts, separate from the train/test split over texts. A concept whose direction is used as a degradation while training cold diffusion is train, a held-out one is eval. No concept is in both.

Concepts

Selection rules (pandas queries on the source columns) and per-concept caveats are in concepts.yaml. Measured on Llama-3.2-1B, output of layer 7, last token: AUROC is the held-out AUROC of the diff-of-means direction; length AUROC is how well character length alone separates the test classes (0.5 = no length confound); max cos eval is the largest |cosine| between the concept's direction and any other eval concept's direction.

concept	split	family	judge description	source	AUROC	length AUROC	max cos eval
positive_sentiment	eval	sentiment	positive sentiment	SST-5 (GLP repo file)	0.85	0.55	0.34 (anger)
sports	eval	topic	sports	AG News	0.96	0.55	0.22 (formality)
anger	eval	emotion	anger	tweet_eval emotion	0.78	0.57	0.34 (positive_sentiment)
french	eval	language	French language	opus_books en-fr	0.92	0.51	0.18 (formality)
toxicity	eval	toxicity	toxic or offensive language	civil_comments	0.84	0.52	0.34 (formality)
formality	eval	style	formal language	Pavlick formality	0.93	0.55	0.34 (toxicity)
world_news	train	topic	world news and international affairs	AG News	0.78	0.55	0.33 (sports)
business	train	topic	business and finance	AG News	0.83	0.53	0.41 (sports)
science_technology	train	topic	science and technology	AG News	0.85	0.55	0.42 (sports)
politics	train	topic	politics and government	Yahoo Answers	0.80	0.55	0.32 (anger)
health	train	topic	health and medicine	Yahoo Answers	0.83	0.52	0.15 (anger)
computers	train	topic	computers and the internet	Yahoo Answers	0.86	0.54	0.11 (sports)
relationships	train	topic	family and relationships	Yahoo Answers	0.87	0.51	0.40 (formality)
entertainment_music	train	topic	entertainment and music	Yahoo Answers	0.83	0.55	0.30 (formality)
animals	train	topic	animals	DBpedia-14	0.96	0.66	0.07 (formality)
plants	train	topic	plants	DBpedia-14	0.94	0.61	0.12 (sports)
film	train	topic	films and movies	DBpedia-14	0.97	0.50	0.09 (positive_sentiment)
transportation	train	topic	vehicles and transportation	DBpedia-14	0.99	0.59	0.16 (anger)
buildings	train	topic	buildings and architecture	DBpedia-14	0.97	0.59	0.08 (toxicity)
nature_geography	train	topic	natural places and geography	DBpedia-14	0.96	0.69	0.14 (formality)
joy	train	emotion	joy and happiness	dair-ai/emotion	0.76	0.55	0.39 (positive_sentiment)
sadness	train	emotion	sadness	dair-ai/emotion	0.67	0.54	0.39 (positive_sentiment)
fear	train	emotion	fear	dair-ai/emotion	0.66	0.51	0.19 (positive_sentiment)
love	train	emotion	love and affection	dair-ai/emotion	0.67	0.53	0.29 (positive_sentiment)
gratitude	train	emotion	gratitude	GoEmotions	0.87	0.55	0.31 (anger)
amusement	train	emotion	amusement and humor	GoEmotions	0.78	0.53	0.32 (formality)
curiosity	train	emotion	curiosity	GoEmotions	0.84	0.53	0.28 (toxicity)
admiration	train	emotion	admiration	GoEmotions	0.83	0.54	0.57 (positive_sentiment)
german	train	language	German language	opus_books de-en	1.00	0.57	0.84 (french)
spanish	train	language	Spanish language	opus_books en-es	0.99	0.50	0.91 (french)
italian	train	language	Italian language	opus_books en-it	1.00	0.51	0.92 (french)
dutch	train	language	Dutch language	opus_books en-nl	1.00	0.54	0.83 (french)
russian	train	language	Russian language	opus_books en-ru	1.00	0.55	0.82 (french)
finnish	train	language	Finnish language	opus_books en-fi	1.00	0.54	0.79 (french)
irony	train	style	irony or sarcasm	tweet_eval irony	0.68	0.55	0.22 (anger)
subjectivity	train	style	subjective opinion	SUBJ (Pang & Lee)	0.98	0.53	0.19 (toxicity)
clickbait	train	style	clickbait headlines	clickbait titles	0.98	0.60	0.32 (formality)
shakespearean	train	style	Shakespearean English	Shakespeare vs modern dialogue	0.99	0.70	0.22 (formality)
python_code	train	format	Python code	python_code_instructions_18k	1.00	0.82	0.20 (formality)

Things to know before using a concept:

Leakage into eval. Every language direction is mostly a shared "not English" direction (cosine 0.79-0.92 with french), and admiration is half positive_sentiment (0.57). Training cold diffusion on them means french (and partly positive_sentiment) is not truly held out. For a strict held-out eval, drop train concepts with max cos eval > 0.5, which leaves 26 train concepts. Keep them to test generalization within a family seen in training.
Weak directions. sadness, fear, love and irony reach AUROC 0.66-0.68 (negatives are other emotions, not neutral text). Below ~0.8 a direction is too weak to steer with reliably.
Length confounds. python_code (0.82), shakespearean (0.70) and the DBpedia classes (0.59-0.69) are partly separable by length. formality is length- and punctuation-matched (see its notes).
Shared sources. sports and the three AG News train concepts come from the same corpus; so do anger and irony (tweet_eval) and french and the other languages (opus_books). The concepts differ; the text style does not.
Two eval concepts were rebuilt on 2026-10-02: anger (dair-ai, AUROC 0.63 -> tweet_eval, 0.78) and formality (DiffMean generations collapsed into "The The The" from alpha 1.0; now punctuation- and length-matched).

Files

concepts.yaml: the manifest, the only place a concept is defined
build.py: builds data/ from the manifest (pinned source revisions, fixed seed, byte-for-byte reproducible)
spar_concepts.py: loaders and get_direction(concept, model_name, layer), which computes and caches directions, class means, activations and held-out AUROC per model and layer. python spar_concepts.py directions prints the table above (AUROC, length AUROC, max cos eval) for any model and layer.

Adding a concept

Add an entry to concepts.yaml (source pinned to a commit, positive/negative queries, judge description, concept_split). Optional source fields: text_column, pairs (two columns forming a matched pair), splits; optional concept fields: match_length, n_train, n_test.
python build.py --only <concept> (other concepts are kept as they are).
python spar_concepts.py directions and check held-out AUROC (below ~0.8 the direction is too weak to steer with), length AUROC (well above 0.5 means a length confound) and max cos eval (high means it leaks into eval).
Add the concept to the table above and push.

Changing an existing concept's texts changes its data hash, so cached directions are recomputed rather than silently reused.

Licenses

Each source keeps its own license: SST-5 and the prefixes via the GLP repo (MIT), AG News (unknown, non-commercial research use), dair-ai/emotion (research use), opus_books (other; public-domain novels), civil_comments (CC0), Pavlick formality scores (CC BY 3.0), tweet_eval (unknown; tweets under Twitter's terms), Yahoo Answers topics (unknown, research use), DBpedia-14 (CC BY-SA 3.0), GoEmotions (Apache 2.0), SUBJ (unknown, research use), clickbait titles (MIT), Shakespeare vs modern dialogue (unknown; public-domain plays and Cornell movie dialogues), python_code_instructions_18k_alpaca (unknown).

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