English
Related papers

Related papers: Sparse Feature Circuits: Discovering and Editing I…

200 papers

Neural network models have achieved high performance on a wide variety of complex tasks, but the algorithms that they implement are notoriously difficult to interpret. It is often necessary to hypothesize intermediate variables involved in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Michael A. Lepori , Thomas Serre , Ellie Pavlick

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yunpeng Zhou

We present causal head gating (CHG), a scalable method for interpreting the functional roles of attention heads in transformer models. CHG learns soft gates over heads and assigns them a causal taxonomy - facilitating, interfering, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Andrew Nam , Henry Conklin , Yukang Yang , Thomas Griffiths , Jonathan Cohen , Sarah-Jane Leslie

Mechanistic interpretability identifies internal circuits responsible for model behaviors, yet translating these findings into human-understandable explanations remains an open problem. We present a pipeline that bridges circuit-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Ajay Pravin Mahale

Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aleksandar Makelov , George Lange , Neel Nanda

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand neural networks by identifying which learned features mediate specific behaviors. Attribution graphs reveal these feature pathways, but interpreting them requires extensive manual analysis --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Giuseppe Birardi

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Adam Karvonen , Can Rager , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

The fields of explainable AI and mechanistic interpretability aim to uncover the internal structure of neural networks, with circuit discovery as a central tool for understanding model computations. Existing approaches, however, rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Elena Golimblevskaia , Aakriti Jain , Bruno Puri , Ammar Ibrahim , Wojciech Samek , Sebastian Lapuschkin

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) induces new behaviors in large language models, yet imposes no structural constraint on how these behaviors are distributed within the model. Existing behavior interpretation methods, such as circuit attribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuping Lin , Pengfei He , Yue Xing , Yingqian Cui , Jiayuan Ding , Subhabrata Mukherjee , Hui Liu , Zhen Xiang

Following their success across many domains, transformers have also proven effective for symbolic regression (SR); however, the internal mechanisms underlying their generation of mathematical operators remain largely unexplored. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Arco van Breda , Erman Acar

We show how fitting sparse linear models over learned deep feature representations can lead to more debuggable neural networks. These networks remain highly accurate while also being more amenable to human interpretation, as we demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Eric Wong , Shibani Santurkar , Aleksander Mądry

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

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

The circuits framework in mechanistic interpretability aims to identify causally important sparse subgraphs of model components, typically evaluated by measuring necessity and sufficiency. We measure circuit reuse, the proportion of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Michael Li , Nishant Subramani

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

Balancing predictive power and interpretability has long been a challenging research area, particularly in powerful yet complex models like neural networks, where nonlinearity obstructs direct interpretation. This paper introduces a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Antoine Ledent , Peng Liu

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) aims to reverse-engineer model behaviors by identifying functional sub-networks. Yet, the scientific validity of these findings depends on their stability. In this work, we argue that circuit discovery is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Maxime Méloux , François Portet , Maxime Peyrard

Deep learning has excelled in medical image classification, but its clinical application is limited by poor interpretability. Capsule networks, known for encoding hierarchical relationships and spatial features, show potential in addressing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Xinyu Geng , Jiaming Wang , Jun Xu

Regression problems with time-series predictors are common in banking and many other areas of application. In this paper, we use multi-head attention networks to develop interpretable features and use them to achieve good predictive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Tianjie Wang , Jie Chen , Joel Vaughan , Vijayan N. Nair

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