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Related papers: Decomposing The Dark Matter of Sparse Autoencoders

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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Zirui He , Mingyu Jin , Bo Shen , Ali Payani , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract sparse, interpretable latents from transformer activations. We test whether commonly used SAE quality metrics and automatic explanation pipelines can distinguish trained transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Thomas Heap , Tim Lawson , Lucy Farnik , Laurence Aitchison

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires learned features to be both interpretable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Akshay Kulkarni , Tsui-Wei Weng , Vivek Narayanaswamy , Shusen Liu , Wesam A. Sakla , Kowshik Thopalli

We present the first systematic study of Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) on video representations. Standard SAEs decompose video into interpretable, monosemantic features but destroy temporal coherence: hard TopK selection produces unstable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Atahan Dokme , Sriram Vishwanath

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

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Lovis Heindrich , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez , Veronika Thost

Standard Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) excel at discovering a dictionary of a model's learned features, offering a powerful observational lens. However, the ambiguous and ungrounded nature of these features makes them unreliable instruments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Jianrong Ding , Muxi Chen , Chenchen Zhao , Qiang Xu

While large language models provide strong compositional reasoning, existing reasoning segmentation pipelines fail to transparently connect this reasoning to visual perception. Current methods, such as latent query alignment, are end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhenyu Lu , Liupeng Li , Jinpeng Wang , Haoqian Kang , Yan Feng , Ke Chen , Yaowei Wang

EEG foundation models achieve state-of-the-art clinical performance, yet the internal computations driving their predictions remain opaque: a barrier to clinical trust. We apply TopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) across three architecturally…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Existing works are dedicated to untangling atomized numerical components (features) from the hidden states of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they typically rely on autoencoders constrained by some training-time regularization on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hakaze Cho , Haolin Yang , Yanshu Li , Brian M. Kurkoski , Naoya Inoue

We demonstrate a new deep learning autoencoder network, trained by a nonnegativity constraint algorithm (NCAE), that learns features which show part-based representation of data. The learning algorithm is based on constraining negative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-13 Ehsan Hosseini-Asl , Jacek M. Zurada , Olfa Nasraoui

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a standard tool for mechanistic interpretability in autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling researchers to extract sparse, human-interpretable features and intervene on model behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Xu Wang , Bingqing Jiang , Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Lingpeng Kong , Difan Zou

Interpretability is critical in high-stakes domains such as medical imaging, where understanding model decisions is essential for clinical adoption. In this work, we introduce Sparse Autoencoder (SAE)-based interpretability to breast…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Krishna Kanth Nakka

Radiological services are experiencing unprecedented demand, leading to increased interest in automating radiology report generation. Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) suffer from hallucinations, lack interpretability, and require…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Ahmed Abdulaal , Hugo Fry , Nina Montaña-Brown , Ayodeji Ijishakin , Jack Gao , Stephanie Hyland , Daniel C. Alexander , Daniel C. Castro

Large language models have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to inspect, control, and systematically improve them. This opacity…

Several recent results in machine learning have established formal connections between autoencoders---artificial neural network models that attempt to reproduce their inputs---and other coding models like sparse coding and K-means. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-22 Leif Johnson , Craig Corcoran