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Large Language Models (LLMs) encode factual knowledge within hidden parametric spaces that are difficult to inspect or control. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can decompose hidden activations into more fine-grained, interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan

Deep learning, particularly with the advancement of Large Language Models, has transformed biomolecular modeling, with protein language models such as ESM inspiring emerging RNA language models such as RiNALMo. Recent work has begun…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2026-05-18 Taehan Kim , Sangdae Nam

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) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) aim to decompose the activation space of large language models (LLMs) into human-interpretable latent directions or features. As we increase the number of features in the SAE, hierarchical features tend to split…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 David Chanin , James Wilken-Smith , Tomáš Dulka , Hardik Bhatnagar , Satvik Golechha , Joseph Bloom

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":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 George Ma , Zhongyuan Liang , Irene Y. Chen , Somayeh Sojoudi

Understanding the internal machinations of deep Transformer-based NLP models is more crucial than ever as these models see widespread use in various domains that affect the public at large, such as industry, academia, finance, health. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Dan Pluth , Zachary Nicholas Houghton , Yu Zhou , Vijay K. Gurbani

Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dan Braun , Jordan Taylor , Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill , Lee Sharkey

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ege Erdogan , Ana Lucic

Recent work shows that Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) applied to large language model (LLM) layers have neurons corresponding to interpretable concepts. These SAE neurons can be modified to align generated outputs, but only towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ananya Joshi , Celia Cintas , Skyler Speakman

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Matthew Levinson

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Stepan Shabalin , Ayush Panda , Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Abdur Raheem Ali , Yixiong Hao , Arthur Conmy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Matthew Chen , Joshua Engels , Max Tegmark

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xuan Yang , Jiayu Liu , Yuhang Lai , Hao Xu , Zhenya Huang , Ning Miao

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Claire Tian , Katherine Tian , Nathan Hu

Diffusion models, while powerful, can inadvertently generate harmful or undesirable content, raising significant ethical and safety concerns. Recent machine unlearning approaches offer potential solutions but often lack transparency, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Bartosz Cywiński , Kamil Deja