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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that SAEs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular technique for interpreting language model activations, and there is extensive recent work on improving SAE effectiveness. However, most prior work evaluates progress using unsupervised proxy metrics…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become central tools for interpretability, leveraging dictionary learning principles to extract sparse, interpretable features from neural representations whose underlying structure is typically…

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

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Charles O'Neill , Christine Ye , Kartheik Iyer , John F. Wu

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose \textsc{Mutual Feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Luke Marks , Alasdair Paren , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Adapting foundation models for specific purposes has become a standard approach to build machine learning systems for downstream applications. Yet, it is an open question which mechanisms take place during adaptation. Here we develop a new…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Hyesu Lim , Jinho Choi , Jaegul Choo , Steffen Schneider

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of their interpretations due to the lack of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Subhash Kantamneni , Joshua Engels , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Max Tegmark , Neel Nanda

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Claire Tian , Katherine Tian , Nathan Hu

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

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

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are powerful tools for interpreting neural representations, yet their use in audio remains underexplored. We train SAEs across all encoder layers of Whisper and HuBERT, provide an extensive evaluation of their…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the features learned by large language models (LLMs). By reconstructing features with sparsely activated networks, SAEs aim to recover complex superposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jingyi Cui , Qi Zhang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Tue M. Cao , Nguyen Do , My T. Thai

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have become a prevalent tool for interpreting language models' inner workings. However, it is unknown how tightly SAE features correspond to computationally important directions in the model. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Thomas Dooms , Daniel Wilhelm

A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Charles O'Neill , Alim Gumran , David Klindt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Adam Karvonen