Related papers: Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability research for large language models; however, the state-of-the-art method of using $k$-sparse autoencoders lacks a theoretical grounding for selecting the…
Recent advances in explainable machine learning have highlighted the potential of sparse autoencoders in uncovering mono-semantic features in densely encoded embeddings. While most research has focused on Large Language Model (LLM)…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network's internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering…
We demonstrate that sparse autoencoders can extract interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet, a production-scale language model, addressing the open question of whether dictionary learning methods scale beyond small transformers. We…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have lately been used to uncover interpretable latent features in large language models. By projecting dense embeddings into a much higher-dimensional and sparse space, learned features become disentangled and…
This paper introduces an efficient and robust method for discovering interpretable circuits in large language models using discrete sparse autoencoders. Our approach addresses key limitations of existing techniques, namely computational…
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…
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…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised method for extracting sparse representations from language models, yet scalable training remains a significant challenge. We introduce a suite of 256 SAEs, trained on each…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been applied to large language models and protein language models, but not systematically to electronic health record (EHR) foundation models. We train TopK SAEs on FlatASCEND, a 14.5-million-parameter…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting language model activations by decomposing them into sparse, interpretable features. A popular approach is the TopK SAE, that uses a fixed number of the most active…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely employed for mechanistic interpretability and model steering. Within this context, steering is by design performed by means of decoding altered SAE intermediate representations. This procedure…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows…
Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features represented in frontier models, it will be necessary to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpreting language model activations. A key evaluation metric is the increase in cross-entropy loss between the original model logits and the reconstructed model logits when replacing model…
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…
Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…