English
Related papers

Related papers: Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Feat…

200 papers

Neural network-based language models deal with data sparsity problems by mapping the large discrete space of words into a smaller continuous space of real-valued vectors. By learning distributed vector representations for words, each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-27 Davide Nunes , Luis Antunes

Sparse autoencoders have become a standard tool for uncovering interpretable latent representations in neural networks. Yet salient concepts often span manifolds that current linear methods cannot capture without post hoc analysis. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Thomas Dooms , Ward Gauderis , Geraint Wiggins , Jose Oramas

We introduce a new approach to systematically map features discovered by sparse autoencoder across consecutive layers of large language models, extending earlier work that examined inter-layer feature links. By using a data-free cosine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Daniil Laptev , Nikita Balagansky , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to probe Large Language Models (LLMs) and extract interpretable concepts from their internal representations. These concepts are linear combinations of neuron activations that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Mathis Le Bail , Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Sonia Vanier

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable feature-level mechanistic interpretability and activation steering in large language models (LLMs), but SAE-based language control remains unreliable in multilingual settings: most SAEs are trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yusser Al Ghussin , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Patrick Schramowski , Simon Ostermann

We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ruixuan Deng , Xiaoyang Hu , Miles Gilberti , Shane Storks , Aman Taxali , Mike Angstadt , Chandra Sripada , Joyce Chai

Neuron-level interpretation in large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally challenged by widespread polysemanticity, where individual neurons respond to multiple distinct semantic concepts. Existing single-pass interpretation methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Weiqi Liu , Yongliang Miao , Haiyan Zhao , Yanguang Liu , Mengnan Du

Transformer-based Language Models have become ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their impressive performance on various tasks. However, expensive training as well as inference remains a significant impediment to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Amit Dhurandhar , Tejaswini Pedapati , Ronny Luss , Soham Dan , Aurelie Lozano , Payel Das , Georgios Kollias

Comparing the internal representations of neural networks is a central goal in both neuroscience and machine learning. Standard alignment metrics operate on raw neural activations, implicitly assuming that similar representations produce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Sunny Liu , Habon Issa , André Longon , Liv Gorton , Meenakshi Khosla , David Klindt

Unsupervised feature extractors are known to perform an efficient and discriminative representation of data. Insight into the mappings they perform and human ability to understand them, however, remain very limited. This is especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Babajide O. Ayinde , Jacek M. Zurada

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for interpreting neural networks by decomposing their activations into sparse sets of human-interpretable features. Recent work has introduced multiple SAE variants and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been used widely to decompose and interpret neural network activations, especially those of transformer language models. One key issue with SAEs is their inability to directly model multidimensional features.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Collin Francel

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach in language model interpretability, offering unsupervised extraction of sparse features. For interpretability methods to succeed, they must identify abstract features across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Lovis Heindrich , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez , Veronika Thost

Automated interpretability research aims to identify concepts encoded in neural network features to enhance human understanding of model behavior. Within the context of large language models (LLMs) for natural language processing (NLP),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Laura Kopf , Nils Feldhus , Kirill Bykov , Philine Lou Bommer , Anna Hedström , Marina M. -C. Höhne , Oliver Eberle

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have become central to scaling large language models, yet their mechanistic differences from dense networks remain poorly understood. Previous work has explored how dense models use \textit{superposition} to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Marmik Chaudhari , Jeremi Nuer , Rome Thorstenson

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand how models store representations by breaking down neural networks into interpretable units. However, the occurrence of polysemantic neurons, or neurons that respond to multiple unrelated…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Laura O'Mahony , Vincent Andrearczyk , Henning Muller , Mara Graziani

Scientific archives now contain hundreds of petabytes of data across genomics, ecology, climate, and molecular biology that could reveal undiscovered patterns if systematically analyzed at scale. Large-scale, weakly-supervised datasets in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Jacob Beattie , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

We introduce sparse autoencoder neural operators (SAE-NOs), a new class of sparse autoencoders that operate in function spaces rather than fixed-dimensional Euclidean representations. We formalize the functional representation hypothesis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bahareh Tolooshams , Ailsa Shen , Anima Anandkumar