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Modern LLMs face inference efficiency challenges due to their scale. To address this, many compression methods have been proposed, such as pruning and quantization. However, the effect of compression on a model's interpretability remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Suchit Gupte , Vishnu Kabir Chhabra , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed as an unsupervised approach to learn a decomposition of a model's latent space. This enables useful applications such as steering - influencing the output of a model towards a desired concept -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Yonatan Belinkov

While vision models are highly capable, their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood -- a challenge which sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have helped address in language, but which remains underexplored in vision. We address this gap by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Sonia Joseph , Praneet Suresh , Ethan Goldfarb , Lorenz Hufe , Yossi Gandelsman , Robert Graham , Danilo Bzdok , Wojciech Samek , Blake Aaron Richards

Vision-language models learn powerful multimodal embeddings, yet their internal semantics remain opaque. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features, they rely on expanding the representation dimension, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Piotr Kubaty , Patryk Marszałek , Łukasz Struski , Adam Wróbel , Jacek Tabor , Marek Śmieja

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

Modern generative and multimodal models increasingly rely on compact latent representations that trade and balance semantic richness with high-fidelity reconstruction. We introduce SALAD-VAE, a continuous and highly compact semantic Audio…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Sebastian Braun , Hannes Gamper , Dimitra Emmanouilidou

Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Javier Ferrando , Enrique Lopez-Cuena , Pablo Agustin Martin-Torres , Daniel Hinjos , Anna Arias-Duart , Dario Garcia-Gasulla

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research…

A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Moghis Fereidouni , Muhammad Umair Haider , Peizhong Ju , A. B. Siddique

Understanding how different AI models encode the same high-level concepts, such as objects or attributes, remains challenging because each model typically produces its own isolated representation. Existing interpretability methods like…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Ali Nasiri-Sarvi , Hassan Rivaz , Mahdi S. Hosseini

The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Edith Natalia Villegas Garcia , Alessio Ansuini

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

Recent work leverages Vision Foundation Models as image encoders to boost the generative performance of latent diffusion models (LDMs), as their semantic feature distributions are easy to learn. However, such semantic features often lack…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Siyu Liu , Chujie Qin , Hubery Yin , Qixin Yan , Zheng-Peng Duan , Chen Li , Jing Lyu , Chun-Le Guo , Chongyi Li

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are now standard tools for decomposing language model activations into interpretable features, and automated interpretability pipelines routinely assign each feature a short natural-language explanation. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jordan F. McCann

Syntactic information contains structures and rules about how text sentences are arranged. Incorporating syntax into text modeling methods can potentially benefit both representation learning and generation. Variational autoencoders (VAEs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang

The Universality Hypothesis in large language models (LLMs) claims that different models converge towards similar concept representations in their latent spaces. Providing evidence for this hypothesis would enable researchers to exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Michael Lan , Philip Torr , Austin Meek , Ashkan Khakzar , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting neural networks by extracting the concepts represented in their activations. However, choosing the size of the SAE dictionary (i.e. number of learned concepts)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Bart Bussmann , Noa Nabeshima , Adam Karvonen , Neel Nanda

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

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 autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic neural representations, where neurons respond to multiple unrelated concepts, into monosemantic features that capture single, interpretable concepts. However, standard training objectives…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Ali Nasiri-Sarvi , Anh Tien Nguyen , Hassan Rivaz , Dimitris Samaras , Mahdi S. Hosseini