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Related papers: Evolution of SAE Features Across Layers in LLMs

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Understanding the multilingual mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) provides insight into how they process different languages, yet this remains challenging. Existing studies often focus on individual neurons, but their polysemantic…

Understanding how features evolve across layers in deep neural networks is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability, particularly due to polysemanticity and feature superposition. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Nikita Balagansky , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jack Gallifant , Shan Chen , Kuleen Sasse , Hugo Aerts , Thomas Hartvigsen , Danielle S. Bitterman

We introduce a new approach to systematically map features discovered by sparse autoencoder across consecutive layers of large language models, extending earlier work that examined inter-layer feature links. By using a data-free cosine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Daniil Laptev , Nikita Balagansky , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have lately been used to uncover interpretable latent features in large language models. By projecting dense embeddings into a much higher-dimensional and sparse space, learned features become disentangled and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Viktoria Schuster

The mechanisms behind multilingual capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been examined using neuron-based or internal-activation-based methods. However, these methods often face challenges such as superposition and layer-wise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Boyi Deng , Yu Wan , Yidan Zhang , Baosong Yang , Fuli Feng

Recent interpretability work on large language models (LLMs) has been increasingly dominated by a feature-discovery approach with the help of proxy modules. Then, the quality of features learned by, e.g., sparse auto-encoders (SAEs), is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mengyu Ye , Jun Suzuki , Tatsuro Inaba , Tatsuki Kuribayashi

Understanding training dynamics and feature evolution is crucial for the mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs). Although sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been used to identify features within LLMs, a clear picture of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yang Xu , Yi Wang , Hengguan Huang , Hao Wang

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

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

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) have been used widely to decompose and interpret neural network activations, especially those of transformer language models. One key issue with SAEs is their inability to directly model multidimensional features.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Collin Francel

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features represented in frontier models, it will be necessary to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Anish Mudide , Joshua Engels , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Christian Schroeder de Witt

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven effective for extracting monosemantic features from large language models (LLMs), yet these features are typically identified in isolation. However, broad evidence suggests that LLMs capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yifan Luo , Yang Zhan , Jiedong Jiang , Tianyang Liu , Mingrui Wu , Zhennan Zhou , Bin Dong

Language models obtain extensive capabilities through pre-training. However, the pre-training process remains a black box. In this work, we track linear interpretable feature evolution across pre-training snapshots using a sparse dictionary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Xuyang Ge , Wentao Shu , Jiaxing Wu , Yunhua Zhou , Zhengfu He , Xipeng Qiu

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) are a promising approach to interpreting the internal representations of transformer language models. However, SAEs are usually trained separately on each transformer layer, making it difficult to use them to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Tim Lawson , Lucy Farnik , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

What latent features are encoded in language model (LM) representations? Recent work on training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle interpretable features in LM representations has shown significant promise. However, evaluating the…

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
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