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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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract human-interpretable features from deep neural networks by transforming their activations into a sparse, higher dimensional latent space, and then reconstructing the activations from these latents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Gonçalo Paulo , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Finding human-understandable circuits in language models is a central goal of the field of mechanistic interpretability. We train models to have more understandable circuits by constraining most of their weights to be zeros, so that each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Leo Gao , Achyuta Rajaram , Jacob Coxon , Soham V. Govande , Bowen Baker , Dan Mossing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque. Recently, mechanistic interpretability has attracted significant attention from the research community as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dong Shu , Xuansheng Wu , Haiyan Zhao , Daking Rai , Ziyu Yao , Ninghao Liu , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring how interpretable they are remains challenging, with weak consensus about which benchmarks to use. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

We introduce methods for discovering and applying sparse feature circuits. These are causally implicated subnetworks of human-interpretable features for explaining language model behaviors. Circuits identified in prior work consist of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Samuel Marks , Can Rager , Eric J. Michaud , Yonatan Belinkov , David Bau , Aaron Mueller

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

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent and process information. Recent approaches based on dictionary learning and transcoders enable representing model computation in terms of sparse,…

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques such as \textit{sparse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Aryaman Arora , Zhengxuan Wu , Jacob Steinhardt , Sarah Schwettmann

Generative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on multimodal reasoning, but how visual inputs are transformed to text remains poorly understood. Existing interpretability work on VLMs uses Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), which decompose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dimitrios Damianos , Leon Voukoutis , Georgios Skyrianos , Vassilis Katsouros , Georgios Paraskevopoulos

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Tao Liang , Mingyang Wan , Guojun Ma , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Transformer-based language models exhibit complex and distributed behavior, yet their internal computations remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods typically treat attention heads and multilayer perceptron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Areeb Ahmad , Abhinav Joshi , Ashutosh Modi

Multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) are an integral part of large language models, yet their dense representations render them difficult to understand, edit, and steer. Recent methods learn interpretable approximations via neuron-level sparsity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 James Oldfield , Shawn Im , Sharon Li , Mihalis A. Nicolaou , Ioannis Patras , Grigorios G Chrysos

Single-cell foundation models (scFMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various tasks, such as cell-type annotation and perturbation response prediction, by learning gene regulatory networks from large-scale transcriptome…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Sosuke Hosokawa , Toshiharu Kawakami , Satoshi Kodera , Masamichi Ito , Norihiko Takeda

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Charles O'Neill , Thang Bui

Understanding the internal activations of Vision Transformers (ViTs) is critical for building interpretable and trustworthy models. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been used to extract human-interpretable features, they operate on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Konstantinos D. Polyzos , Zhuowei Li , Difei Gu , Gemma E. Moran , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Shun Wang , Tyler Loakman , Youbo Lei , Yi Liu , Bohao Yang , Yuting Zhao , Dong Yang , Chenghua Lin

Understanding the internal machinations of deep Transformer-based NLP models is more crucial than ever as these models see widespread use in various domains that affect the public at large, such as industry, academia, finance, health. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Dan Pluth , Zachary Nicholas Houghton , Yu Zhou , Vijay K. Gurbani
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