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Pathology plays an important role in disease diagnosis, treatment decision-making and drug development. Previous works on interpretability for machine learning models on pathology images have revolved around methods such as attention value…

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Xuansheng Wu , Wenhao Yu , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Tue M. Cao , Nguyen Do , My T. Thai

Understanding the multilingual mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) provides insight into how they process different languages, yet this remains challenging. Existing studies often focus on individual neurons, but their polysemantic…

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

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

The Linear Representation Hypothesis asserts that the embeddings learned by neural networks can be understood as linear combinations of features corresponding to high-level concepts. Based on this ansatz, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chiraag Kaushik , Davis Barch , Andrea Fanelli

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs), revealing latent latent features with semantical meaning. This interpretability has also…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-07-11 Haoxiang Guan , Jiyan He , Jie Zhang

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) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie

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

Learned sparse and dense representations capture different successful approaches to text retrieval and the fusion of their results has proven to be more effective and robust. Prior work combines dense and sparse retrievers by fusing their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-12-10 Sheng-Chieh Lin , Jimmy Lin

Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aleksandar Makelov , George Lange , Neel Nanda

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Tao Liang , Mingyang Wan , Guojun Ma , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

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 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

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 -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Yonatan Belinkov

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