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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability to project LLM activations onto sparse latent spaces. However, sparsity alone is an imperfect proxy for interpretability, and current training objectives often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

Recent works have proposed that activations in language models can be modelled as sparse linear combinations of vectors corresponding to features of input text. Under this assumption, these works aimed to reconstruct feature directions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Mingyang Deng , Lucas Tao , Joe Benton

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool for analyzing and interpreting the activation space of transformer-based language models (LMs). However, SAEs suffer several shortcomings that diminish their utility and internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Harry Mayne , Yushi Yang , Adam Mahdi

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a predominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, aiming to identify interpretable monosemantic features. However, how does sparse encoding organize the representations of activation vector from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wenjie Sun , Bingzhe Wu , Zhile Yang , Chengke Wu

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) aim to decompose the activation space of large language models (LLMs) into human-interpretable latent directions or features. As we increase the number of features in the SAE, hierarchical features tend to split…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 David Chanin , James Wilken-Smith , Tomáš Dulka , Hardik Bhatnagar , Satvik Golechha , Joseph Bloom

Sparse attention has been claimed to increase model interpretability under the assumption that it highlights influential inputs. Yet the attention distribution is typically over representations internal to the model rather than the inputs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Clara Meister , Stefan Lazov , Isabelle Augenstein , Ryan Cotterell

When dealing with clinical text classification on a small dataset recent studies have confirmed that a well-tuned multilayer perceptron outperforms other generative classifiers, including deep learning ones. To increase the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Thanh-Dung Le , Rita Noumeir , Jerome Rambaud , Guillaume Sans , Philippe Jouvet

In this paper, we investigate the usage of autoencoders in modeling textual data. Traditional autoencoders suffer from at least two aspects: scalability with the high dimensionality of vocabulary size and dealing with task-irrelevant words.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-12-15 Shuangfei Zhai , Zhongfei Zhang

Disentangling the encodings of neural models is a fundamental aspect for improving interpretability, semantic control and downstream task performance in Natural Language Processing. Currently, most disentanglement methods are unsupervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Danilo S. Carvalho , Giangiacomo Mercatali , Yingji Zhang , Andre Freitas

Distributional models are derived from co-occurrences in a corpus, where only a small proportion of all possible plausible co-occurrences will be observed. This results in a very sparse vector space, requiring a mechanism for inferring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-08-25 Thomas Kober , Julie Weeds , Jeremy Reffin , David Weir

Transformer models have become state-of-the-art in decoding stimuli and behavior from neural activity, significantly advancing neuroscience research. Yet greater transparency in their decision-making processes would substantially enhance…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2025-06-18 Laurence Freeman , Philip Shamash , Vinam Arora , Caswell Barry , Tiago Branco , Eva Dyer

Large language models can be uncertain yet correct, or confident yet wrong, raising the question of whether their output-level uncertainty and their actual correctness are driven by the same internal mechanisms or by distinct feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Het Patel , Tiejin Chen , Hua Wei , Evangelos E. Papalexakis , Jia Chen

Preference learning in large language models relies on reward models as proxies for human judgment. However, these models frequently exhibit preference instability, producing contradictory preference assignments in response to subtle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shunchang Liu , Xin Chen , Belen Martin Urcelay , Francesco Croce

Understanding the internal computations of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for aligning them with human values and preventing undesirable behaviors like toxic content generation. However, mechanistic interpretability is hindered by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jungwoo Park , Young Jin Ahn , Kee-Eung Kim , Jaewoo Kang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic neural representations, where neurons respond to multiple unrelated concepts, into monosemantic features that capture single, interpretable concepts. However, standard training objectives…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Ali Nasiri-Sarvi , Anh Tien Nguyen , Hassan Rivaz , Dimitris Samaras , Mahdi S. Hosseini

Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

We train multi-task autoencoders on linguistic tasks and analyze the learned hidden sentence representations. The representations change significantly when translation and part-of-speech decoders are added. The more decoders a model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-01-19 Gino Brunner , Yuyi Wang , Roger Wattenhofer , Michael Weigelt

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed as an unsupervised approach to learn a decomposition of a model's latent space. This enables useful applications such as steering - influencing the output of a model towards a desired concept -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Yonatan Belinkov
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