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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a powerful dictionary learning technique for decomposing neural network activations, translating the hidden state into human ideas with high semantic value despite no external intervention or guidance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Albert Miao , Chenliang Zhou , Jiawei Zhou , Cengiz Oztireli

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool in mechanistic interpretability, helping to analyze internal representations in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). By decomposing polysemantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jakub Stępień , Marcin Mazur , Jacek Tabor , Przemysław Spurek

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xudong Zhu , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili , Zhihui Zhu

Model internals encode rich information about how a large language model (LLM) processes its training data; however, post-training data engineering largely relies on external signals and ignores rich intrinsic signals lying in model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yi Jing , Zao Dai , Jinwu Hu , Zijun Yao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li , Xiaozhi Wang

An LLM's residual stream is both state and instruction: it encodes the current context and determines the next transformation. We introduce a parameter-free decomposition for Mixture-of-Experts models that splits each layer's hidden state…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Charles Ye , Bo Yuan , Lee Sharkey

Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zirui He , Haiyan Zhao , Yiran Qiao , Fan Yang , Ali Payani , Jing Ma , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Tom Lieberum , Nicolas Sonnerat , Arthur Conmy , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Neel Nanda

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

Large language models (LLMs) can store a significant amount of factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their parametric knowledge may conflict with the information provided in the context -- this phenomenon, known as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Yu Zhao , Alessio Devoto , Giwon Hong , Xiaotang Du , Aryo Pradipta Gema , Hongru Wang , Xuanli He , Kam-Fai Wong , Pasquale Minervini

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

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…

Despite being one of the earliest neural network layers, the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is arguably one of the least understood parts of the transformer architecture due to its dense computation and lack of easy visualization. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Enric Boix-Adsera

We study the challenge of achieving theoretically grounded feature recovery using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) for the interpretation of Large Language Models. Existing SAE training algorithms often lack rigorous mathematical guarantees and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Xuyuan Xiong , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Generative models of observations under interventions have been a vibrant topic of interest across machine learning and the sciences in recent years. For example, in drug discovery, there is a need to model the effects of diverse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-17 Michael Bereket , Theofanis Karaletsos

Neural network approaches to single-channel speech enhancement have received much recent attention. In particular, mask-based architectures have achieved significant performance improvements over conventional methods. This paper proposes a…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-22 Bengt J. Borgstrom , Michael S. Brandstein

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for extracting human-interpretable features from neural networks activations. Previous works compared different models based on SAE-derived features but those comparisons have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Clément Cornet , Romaric Besançon , Hervé Le Borgne

Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Cheng-Ting Chou , George Liu , Jessica Sun , Cole Blondin , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are useful for detecting and steering interpretable features in neural networks, with particular potential for understanding complex multimodal representations. Given their ability to uncover interpretable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vladimir Zaigrajew , Hubert Baniecki , Przemyslaw Biecek