Related papers: Interpretability as Compression: Reconsidering SAE…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…
Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover closed-form mathematical expressions that accurately describe data, offering interpretability and analytical insight beyond standard black-box models. Existing SR methods often rely on…
We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to steer large language models (LLMs), based on the assumption that their interpretable features naturally enable effective model behavior steering. Yet, a fundamental question remains unanswered:…
While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…
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.…
The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques such as \textit{sparse…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…
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…
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.…
Understanding and mitigating the potential risks associated with foundation models (FMs) hinges on developing effective interpretability methods. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for disentangling FM…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to extracting features from neural networks, enabling model interpretability as well as causal interventions on model internals. SAEs generate sparse feature representations using a…
The linear representation hypothesis states that neural network activations encode high-level concepts as linear mixtures. However, under superposition, this encoding is a projection from a higher-dimensional concept space into a…
Intermediate layers of large language models (LLMs) best predict human brain responses to language, one of the most robust findings in computational neurolinguistics, yet why remains mechanistically unexplained. We address this gap by…
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…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…
We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language…
Pathology plays an important role in disease diagnosis, treatment decision-making and drug development. Previous works on interpretability for machine learning models on pathology images have revolved around methods such as attention value…
Transformer models have become state-of-the-art in decoding stimuli and behavior from neural activity, significantly advancing neuroscience research. Yet greater transparency in their decision-making processes would substantially enhance…