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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract millions of interpretable features from a language model, but flat feature inventories aren't very useful on their own. Domain concepts get mixed with generic and weakly grounded features, while related…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 John Winnicki , Abeynaya Gnanasekaran , Eric Darve

Understanding neural networks is challenging in part because of the dense, continuous nature of their hidden states. We explore whether we can train neural networks to have hidden states that are sparse, discrete, and more interpretable by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Alex Tamkin , Mohammad Taufeeque , Noah D. Goodman

Despite strong performance in audio perception tasks, large audio-language models (AudioLLMs) remain opaque to interpretation. A major factor behind this lack of interpretability is that individual neurons in these models frequently…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Townim Faisal Chowdhury , Ta Duc Huy , Siqi Pan , Jeremy Stoddard , Zhibin Liao

Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Compressed sensing techniques enable efficient acquisition and recovery of sparse, high-dimensional data signals via low-dimensional projections. In this work, we propose Uncertainty Autoencoders, a learning framework for unsupervised…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-15 Aditya Grover , Stefano Ermon

Recent developments in high throughput profiling of individual neurons have spurred data driven exploration of the idea that there exist natural groupings of neurons referred to as cell types. The promise of this idea is that the immense…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-11-14 Rohan Gala , Nathan Gouwens , Zizhen Yao , Agata Budzillo , Osnat Penn , Bosiljka Tasic , Gabe Murphy , Hongkui Zeng , Uygar Sümbül

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires learned features to be both interpretable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Akshay Kulkarni , Tsui-Wei Weng , Vivek Narayanaswamy , Shusen Liu , Wesam A. Sakla , Kowshik Thopalli

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for extracting human-interpretable features from neural networks activations. Previous works compared different models based on SAE-derived features but those comparisons have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Clément Cornet , Romaric Besançon , Hervé Le Borgne

Neural Audio Codecs (NACs) are widely adopted in modern speech systems, yet how they encode linguistic and paralinguistic information remains unclear. Improving the interpretability of NAC representations is critical for understanding and…

The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Edith Natalia Villegas Garcia , Alessio Ansuini

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become central tools for interpretability, leveraging dictionary learning principles to extract sparse, interpretable features from neural representations whose underlying structure is typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

Recently, it has been observed that when representations are learnt in a way that encourages sparsity, improved performance is obtained on classification tasks. These methods involve combinations of activation functions, sampling steps and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-03-25 Alireza Makhzani , Brendan Frey

Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-10 Omar Claflin

Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mark Muchane , Sean Richardson , Kiho Park , Victor Veitch

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without task-specific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Xinwei Wu , Heng Liu , Xiaohu Zhao , Yuqi Ren , Linlong Xu , Longyue Wang , Deyi Xiong , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

Distributional models provide a convenient way to model semantics using dense embedding spaces derived from unsupervised learning algorithms. However, the dimensions of dense embedding spaces are not designed to resemble human semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Steven Derby , Paul Miller , Brian Murphy , Barry Devereux

The Universality Hypothesis in large language models (LLMs) claims that different models converge towards similar concept representations in their latent spaces. Providing evidence for this hypothesis would enable researchers to exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Michael Lan , Philip Torr , Austin Meek , Ashkan Khakzar , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for decomposing language model representations into interpretable features. Current interpretation methods infer feature semantics from activation patterns, but overlook that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yiting Liu , Zhi-Hong Deng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chiraag Kaushik , Davis Barch , Andrea Fanelli