When should we trust a latent representation?

Working on AI Safety, I spend a significant part of my time thinking about how frontier AI Safety research eventually gets translated into deployable safety systems. One thing I have constantly noticed is the transition from research to deployment changes the question we ask. In research, it is often sufficient to demonstrate that a latent representation correlates with; or even causally influences a particular behavior. However, in a deployment scenario the bar is much higher. When the rubber m...