diff --git a/src/lm_saes/runner.py b/src/lm_saes/runner.py
index 17f89a3e..0224eee1 100644
--- a/src/lm_saes/runner.py
+++ b/src/lm_saes/runner.py
@@ -81,11 +81,10 @@ def language_model_sae_runner(cfg: LanguageModelSAETrainingConfig):
     model.eval()
     activation_store = ActivationStore.from_config(model=model, cfg=cfg.act_store)
 
-    if (
+    if not cfg.finetuning and (
             cfg.sae.norm_activation == "dataset-wise" and cfg.sae.dataset_average_activation_norm is None
             or cfg.sae.init_decoder_norm is None
     ):
-        assert not cfg.finetuning
         sae = SparseAutoEncoder.from_initialization_searching(
             activation_store=activation_store,
             cfg=cfg,
@@ -97,8 +96,9 @@ def language_model_sae_runner(cfg: LanguageModelSAETrainingConfig):
             # Fine-tune SAE with frozen encoder weights and bias
             sae.train_finetune_for_suppression_parameters()
 
-    cfg.sae.save_hyperparameters(os.path.join(cfg.exp_result_dir, cfg.exp_name))
-    cfg.lm.save_lm_config(os.path.join(cfg.exp_result_dir, cfg.exp_name))
+    if is_master():
+        cfg.sae.save_hyperparameters(os.path.join(cfg.exp_result_dir, cfg.exp_name))
+        cfg.lm.save_lm_config(os.path.join(cfg.exp_result_dir, cfg.exp_name))
 
     if cfg.wandb.log_to_wandb and is_master():
         wandb_config: dict = {