English
Related papers

Related papers: Evolution of SAE Features Across Layers in LLMs

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without task-specific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Xinwei Wu , Heng Liu , Xiaohu Zhao , Yuqi Ren , Linlong Xu , Longyue Wang , Deyi Xiong , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

Previous studies primarily utilize MLP neurons as units of analysis for understanding the mechanisms of factual knowledge in Language Models (LMs); however, neurons suffer from polysemanticity, leading to limited knowledge expression and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yuheng Chen , Pengfei Cao , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) learn non-trivial abstractions during pretraining, such as detecting irregular plural noun subjects. However, because traditional evaluation methods (e.g., benchmarking) fail to reveal how models acquire these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Deniz Bayazit , Aaron Mueller , Antoine Bosselut

Protein language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in protein modeling and design, yet their internal mechanisms for predicting structure and function remain poorly understood. Here we present a systematic approach to…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-18 Elana Simon , James Zou

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…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Seonglae Cho , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama

We study how information propagates in decoder-only Transformers, which are the architectural backbone of most existing frontier large language models (LLMs). We rely on a theoretical signal propagation analysis -- specifically, we analyse…

Predicting protein function from amino acid sequence remains a central challenge in data-scarce (low-$N$) regimes, limiting machine learning-guided protein design when only small amounts of assay-labeled sequence-function data are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Darin Tsui , Kunal Talreja , Amirali Aghazadeh

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in emotionally sensitive human-AI applications, yet little is known about how emotion recognition is internally represented. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms of emotion…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Bangzhao Shu , Arinjay Singh , Mai ElSherief

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability to project LLM activations onto sparse latent spaces. However, sparsity alone is an imperfect proxy for interpretability, and current training objectives often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Can Demircan , Tankred Saanum , Akshay K. Jagadish , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

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

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

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

A key goal in mechanistic interpretability is circuit analysis: finding sparse subgraphs of models corresponding to specific behaviors or capabilities. However, MLP sublayers make fine-grained circuit analysis on transformer-based language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Jacob Dunefsky , Philippe Chlenski , Neel Nanda

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Mechanistic interpretability aims to decompose neural networks into interpretable features and map their connecting circuits. The standard approach trains sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on each layer's activations. However, SAEs trained in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sean P. Fillingham , Andrew Gordon , Peter Lai , Xavier Poncini , David Quarel , Stefan Heimersheim

The ImageNet hierarchy provides a structured taxonomy of object categories, offering a valuable lens through which to analyze the representations learned by deep vision models. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of how vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Structured variational autoencoders (SVAEs) combine probabilistic graphical model priors on latent variables, deep neural networks to link latent variables to observed data, and structure-exploiting algorithms for approximate posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-29 Yixiu Zhao , Scott W. Linderman

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