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As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the…
We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been used extensively to discover low-dimensional latent factors governing neural activity and animal behavior. However, without careful model selection, the uncovered latent factors may reflect noise in…
Spikes are the currency in central nervous systems for information transmission and processing. They are also believed to play an essential role in low-power consumption of the biological systems, whose efficiency attracts increasing…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there…
Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…
Masked autoencoder (MAE), a simple and effective self-supervised learning framework based on the reconstruction of masked image regions, has recently achieved prominent success in a variety of vision tasks. Despite the emergence of…
Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can efficiently identify candidate monosemantic features from pretrained neural networks for galaxy morphology. We demonstrate this on Euclid Q1 images using both supervised (Zoobot) and new self-supervised (MAE)…
Recovering dynamical equations from observed noisy data is the central challenge of system identification. We develop a statistical mechanics approach to analyze sparse equation discovery algorithms, which typically balance data fit and…
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose \textsc{Mutual Feature…
Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…
Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have emerged as powerful probabilistic models for generative tasks. However, their convergence properties have not been rigorously proven. The challenge of proving convergence is inherently difficult due to…
The Linear Representation Hypothesis asserts that the embeddings learned by neural networks can be understood as linear combinations of features corresponding to high-level concepts. Based on this ansatz, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…
Structured variational autoencoders (SVAEs) combine probabilistic graphical model priors on latent variables, deep neural networks to link latent variables to observed data, and structure-exploiting algorithms for approximate posterior…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient solution by utilizing the spike-based and sparse nature of biological systems. Since the advent of Transformers, SNNs have struggled to compete with artificial networks on long…