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We propose Low-Rank Sparse Attention (Lorsa), a sparse replacement model of Transformer attention layers to disentangle original Multi Head Self Attention (MHSA) into individually comprehensible components. Lorsa is designed to address the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zhengfu He , Junxuan Wang , Rui Lin , Xuyang Ge , Wentao Shu , Qiong Tang , Junping Zhang , Xipeng Qiu

Recovering meaningful concepts from language model activations is a central aim of interpretability. While existing feature extraction methods aim to identify concepts that are independent directions, it is unclear if this assumption can…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerged as a promising tool for mechanistic interpretability of transformer-based foundation models. Very recently, SAEs were also adopted for the visual domain, enabling the discovery of visual concepts and their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen , Hyesu Lim , Michele Buck , Katharina S. Götze , Carsten Marr , Steffen Schneider

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

In this paper we propose Structuring AutoEncoders (SAE). SAEs are neural networks which learn a low dimensional representation of data which are additionally enriched with a desired structure in this low dimensional space. While traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Marco Rudolph , Bastian Wandt , Bodo Rosenhahn

LLMs increasingly require surgical model editing to enhance domain-specific capabilities without incurring the computational cost or catastrophic forgetting associated with full fine-tuning. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Li Lei , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a predominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, aiming to identify interpretable monosemantic features. However, how does sparse encoding organize the representations of activation vector from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wenjie Sun , Bingzhe Wu , Zhile Yang , Chengke Wu

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)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Daniel Pluth , Yu Zhou , Vijay K. Gurbani

Artificial Text Detection (ATD) is becoming increasingly important with the rise of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite numerous efforts, no single algorithm performs consistently well across different types of unseen text or…

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

We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Florent Draye , Anson Lei , Hsiao-Ru Pan , Ingmar Posner , Bernhard Schölkopf

Sparse autoencoders provide a promising unsupervised approach for extracting interpretable features from a language model by reconstructing activations from a sparse bottleneck layer. Since language models learn many concepts, autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Leo Gao , Tom Dupré la Tour , Henk Tillman , Gabriel Goh , Rajan Troll , Alec Radford , Ilya Sutskever , Jan Leike , Jeffrey Wu

Determining company similarity is a vital task in finance, underpinning risk management, hedging, and portfolio diversification. Practitioners often rely on sector and industry classifications such as SIC and GICS codes to gauge similarity,…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to discover sparse and human-interpretable representations of the latent activations of LLMs. However, we would ultimately like to understand the computations performed by LLMs and not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Lucy Farnik , Tim Lawson , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

Standard Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) excel at discovering a dictionary of a model's learned features, offering a powerful observational lens. However, the ambiguous and ungrounded nature of these features makes them unreliable instruments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Jianrong Ding , Muxi Chen , Chenchen Zhao , Qiang Xu

Protein language models have revolutionized structure prediction, but their nonlinear nature obscures how sequence representations inform structure prediction. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a path to interpretability here by…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-13 Nithin Parsan , David J. Yang , John J. Yang

The linear representation hypothesis states that neural network activations encode high-level concepts as linear mixtures. However, under superposition, this encoding is a projection from a higher-dimensional concept space into a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Vitória Barin Pacela , Shruti Joshi , Isabela Camacho , Simon Lacoste-Julien , David Klindt

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for learning interpretable features from neural network activations. However, the optimization landscape for SAE training can be challenging due to correlations in the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ashwin Saraswatula , David Klindt

Recent studies in interpretability have explored the inner workings of transformer models trained on tasks across various domains, often discovering that these networks naturally develop highly structured representations. When such…