English
Related papers

Related papers: Group-SAE: Efficient Training of Sparse Autoencode…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to optimization-based jailbreak attacks that exploit internal gradient structure. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpretability, their robustness implications remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Ahson Saiyed , Sabrina Sadiekh , Chirag Agarwal

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to interpreting the internal representations of transformer language models. However, SAEs are usually trained separately on each transformer layer, making it difficult to use them to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Tim Lawson , Lucy Farnik , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to probe Large Language Models (LLMs) and extract interpretable concepts from their internal representations. These concepts are linear combinations of neuron activations that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Mathis Le Bail , Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Sonia Vanier

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jiaojiao Han , Wujiang Xu , Mingyu Jin , Mengnan Du

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

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) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Jacob S. Prince , Matthew Kowal , Victor Boutin , Isabel Papadimitriou , Binxu Wang , Martin Wattenberg , Demba Ba , Talia Konkle

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xudong Zhu , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili , Zhihui Zhu

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Abhinav Menon , Manish Shrivastava , David Krueger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained in complex Reinforcement Learning, multi-agent environments, making it difficult to understand how behavior changes over training. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently shown to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 John Yan , Michael Yu , Yuqi Sun , Alexander Duffy , Tyler Marques , Matthew Lyle Olson

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are one of the main methods to interpret the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs), decomposing activations into higher-dimensional features. However, they exhibit critical shortcomings where a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michał Brzozowski , Neo Christopher Chung

We propose a novel method that leverages sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and clustering techniques to analyze the internal token representations of large language models (LLMs) and guide generations in mathematical reasoning tasks. Our approach…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Daniel Zhao , Abhilash Shankarampeta , Lanxiang Hu , Tajana Rosing , Hao Zhang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been applied to large language models and protein language models, but not systematically to electronic health record (EHR) foundation models. We train TopK SAEs on FlatASCEND, a 14.5-million-parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Chris Sainsbury , Feng Dong , Andreas Karwath

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose large language model (LLM) activations into latent features that reveal mechanistic structure. Conventional SAEs train on broad data distributions, forcing a fixed latent budget to capture only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Charles O'Neill , Mudith Jayasekara , Max Kirkby

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Patrick Leask , Neel Nanda , Noura Al Moubayed

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to extract interpretable features from language models by enforcing a sparsity constraint. Ideally, training an SAE would yield latents that are both sparse and semantically meaningful. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Xiaoqing Sun , Alessandro Stolfo , Joshua Engels , Ben Wu , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Mrinmaya Sachan , Max Tegmark

Recent LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance by integrating deep thinking and complex reasoning during generation. However, the internal mechanisms behind these reasoning processes remain unexplored. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Polina Druzhinina , Anton Razzhigaev , Oleg Y. Rogov , Elena Tutubalina , Ivan Oseledets

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features represented in frontier models, it will be necessary to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Anish Mudide , Joshua Engels , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Christian Schroeder de Witt

What latent features are encoded in language model (LM) representations? Recent work on training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle interpretable features in LM representations has shown significant promise. However, evaluating the…