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Circuit analysis of any certain model behavior is a central task in mechanistic interpretability. We introduce our circuit discovery pipeline with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and a variant called Transcoders. With these two modules inserted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Xuyang Ge , Fukang Zhu , Wentao Shu , Junxuan Wang , Zhengfu He , Xipeng Qiu

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Philipp Wesp , Robbie Holland , Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa , Sergios Gatidis

Interpreting the internal activations of neural networks can produce more faithful explanations of their behavior, but is difficult due to the complex structure of activation space. Existing approaches to scalable interpretability use…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Vincent Huang , Dami Choi , Daniel D. Johnson , Sarah Schwettmann , Jacob Steinhardt

Dense retrieval requires high-quality text sequence embeddings to support effective search in the representation space. Autoencoder-based language models are appealing in dense retrieval as they train the encoder to output high-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Shuqi Lu , Di He , Chenyan Xiong , Guolin Ke , Waleed Malik , Zhicheng Dou , Paul Bennett , Tieyan Liu , Arnold Overwijk

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…

Auto-Encoders are unsupervised models that aim to learn patterns from observed data by minimizing a reconstruction cost. The useful representations learned are often found to be sparse and distributed. On the other hand, compressed sensing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-14 Devansh Arpit , Yingbo Zhou , Hung Q. Ngo , Nils Napp , Venu Govindaraju

Sparse neural networks are often hypothesized to be more interpretable than dense models, motivated by findings that weight sparsity can produce compact circuits in language models. However, it remains unclear whether structural sparsity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Siyu Zhang

Artificial neural networks (ANNs), specifically deep learning networks, have often been labeled as black boxes due to the fact that the internal representation of the data is not easily interpretable. In our work, we illustrate that an ANN,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Edward Kim , Connor Onweller , Andrew O'Brien , Kathleen McCoy

A new method for the unsupervised learning of sparse representations using autoencoders is proposed and implemented by ordering the output of the hidden units by their activation value and progressively reconstructing the input in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-09 Paul Bertens

Deep Learning models enjoy considerable success in Natural Language Processing. While deep architectures produce useful representations that lead to improvements in various tasks, they are often difficult to interpret. This makes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2013-04-29 Christian Scheible , Hinrich Schuetze

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Sparse autoencoders are a promising new approach for decomposing language model activations for interpretation and control. They have been applied successfully to vision transformer image encoders and to small-scale diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Stepan Shabalin , Ayush Panda , Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Abdur Raheem Ali , Yixiong Hao , Arthur Conmy

Sparse coding approximates the data sample as a sparse linear combination of some basic codewords and uses the sparse codes as new presentations. In this paper, we investigate learning discriminative sparse codes by sparse coding in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-01-19 Jim Jing-Yan Wang , Xin Gao

Large language models (LLMs) encode a diverse range of linguistic features within their latent representations, which can be harnessed to steer their output toward specific target characteristics. In this paper, we modify the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of their interpretations due to the lack of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Subhash Kantamneni , Joshua Engels , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Max Tegmark , Neel Nanda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Wei Chen , Jingxi Yu , Zichen Miao , Qiang Qiu

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

Sparse coding networks, which utilize unsupervised learning to maximize coding efficiency, have successfully reproduced response properties found in primary visual cortex \cite{AN:OlshausenField96}. However, conventional sparse coding…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2011-05-25 William K. Coulter , Christopher J. Hillar , Friedrich T. Sommer