Related papers: Automatically Interpreting Millions of Features in…
Recently generating natural language explanations has shown very promising results in not only offering interpretable explanations but also providing additional information and supervision for prediction. However, existing approaches…
In this thesis, we develop methods to enhance the interpretability of recent representation learning techniques in natural language processing (NLP) while accounting for the unavailability of annotated data. We choose to leverage…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing Large Langage Models (LLM) activations into interpretable latents. However, due to their substantial training cost, most academic research uses open-source SAEs which are only…
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…
Neurons in large language models often exhibit \emph{polysemanticity}, simultaneously encoding multiple unrelated concepts and obscuring interpretability. Instead of relying on post-hoc methods, we present \textbf{MoE-X}, a…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but these techniques require many expensive backward passes…
Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to discover sparse and human-interpretable representations of the latent activations of LLMs. However, we would ultimately like to understand the computations performed by LLMs and not…
Despite the growing reasoning capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs), their internal mechanisms during the reasoning process remain underexplored. Prior approaches often rely on human-defined concepts (e.g., overthinking,…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach in language model interpretability, offering unsupervised extraction of sparse features. For interpretability methods to succeed, they must identify abstract features across…
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…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM…
Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…
Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but often lack interpretability and controllability. This paper introduces a novel approach using sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret and control dense embeddings via the learned…
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 -…
We introduce sparse autoencoder neural operators (SAE-NOs), a new class of sparse autoencoders that operate in function spaces rather than fixed-dimensional Euclidean representations. We formalize the functional representation hypothesis,…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…
Sparse Auto-Encoders (SAEs) are commonly employed in mechanistic interpretability to decompose the residual stream into monosemantic SAE latents. Recent work demonstrates that perturbing a model's activations at an early layer results in a…