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Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Dongsheng Wang , Jinsen Zhang , Dawei Su , Hui Huang

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 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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hao Kang , Tevin Wang , Chenyan Xiong

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 commonly used to interpret the internal activations of large language models (LLMs) by mapping them to human-interpretable concept representations. While existing evaluations of SAEs focus on metrics such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Aaron J. Li , Suraj Srinivas , Usha Bhalla , Himabindu Lakkaraju

We study the challenge of achieving theoretically grounded feature recovery using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) for the interpretation of Large Language Models. Existing SAE training algorithms often lack rigorous mathematical guarantees and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Xuyuan Xiong , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool in mechanistic interpretability, helping to analyze internal representations in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). By decomposing polysemantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jakub Stępień , Marcin Mazur , Jacek Tabor , Przemysław Spurek

As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jiaming Li , Haoran Ye , Yukun Chen , Xinyue Li , Lei Zhang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Jimmy Chih-Hsien Peng , Min Yang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a technique for sparse decomposition of neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, current SAEs suffer from feature absorption, where specialized features capture instances of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Elena Tutubalina , Ivan Oseledets

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that SAEs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Collin Francel

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are powerful tools for interpreting neural representations, yet their use in audio remains underexplored. We train SAEs across all encoder layers of Whisper and HuBERT, provide an extensive evaluation of their…

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable interpretability research by decomposing entangled model activations into monosemantic features. However, under what circumstances SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety, a low-frequency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jiaqi Weng , Han Zheng , Hanyu Zhang , Ej Zhou , Qinqin He , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Zhixuan Chu , Xiting Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Eoin Farrell , Yeu-Tong Lau , Arthur Conmy

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

In this paper we propose Structuring AutoEncoders (SAE). SAEs are neural networks which learn a low dimensional representation of data which are additionally enriched with a desired structure in this low dimensional space. While traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Marco Rudolph , Bastian Wandt , Bodo Rosenhahn

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a mechanistic interpretability technique that have been used to provide insight into learned concepts within large protein language models. Here, we employ TopK and Ordered SAEs to investigate autoregressive…

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu