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Deepfake detection models have achieved high accuracy in identifying synthetic media, but their decision processes remain largely opaque. In this paper we present a mechanistic interpretability framework for deepfake detection applied to a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Subramanyam Sahoo , Jared Junkin

We introduce Sparse Concept Anchoring, a method that biases latent space to position a targeted subset of concepts while allowing others to self-organize, using only minimal supervision (labels for <0.1% of examples per anchored concept).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sandy Fraser , Patryk Wielopolski

Linear concept vectors effectively steer LLMs, but existing methods suffer from noisy features in diverse datasets that undermine steering robustness. We propose Sparse Autoencoder-Denoised Concept Vectors (SDCV), which selectively keep the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Haiyan Zhao , Xuansheng Wu , Fan Yang , Bo Shen , Ninghao Liu , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) interpret neural network representations by decomposing activations into sparse combinations of dictionary atoms. However, SAEs assume features combine additively through linear reconstruction, an assumption that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Panagiotis Koromilas , Andreas D. Demou , James Oldfield , Yannis Panagakis , Mihalis Nicolaou

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) aim to disentangle model activations into monosemantic, human-interpretable features. In practice, learned features are often redundant and vary across training runs and sparsity levels, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Cristina P. Martin-Linares , Jonathan P. Ling

Sparse support recovery arises in many applications in communications and signal processing. Existing methods tackle sparse support recovery problems for a given measurement matrix, and cannot flexibly exploit the properties of sparsity…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Shuaichao Li , Wanqing Zhang , Ying Cui , Hei Victor Cheng , Wei Yu

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a predominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, aiming to identify interpretable monosemantic features. However, how does sparse encoding organize the representations of activation vector from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wenjie Sun , Bingzhe Wu , Zhile Yang , Chengke Wu

Artistic style transfer in generative models remains a significant challenge, as existing methods often introduce style only via model fine-tuning, additional adapters, or prompt engineering, all of which can be computationally expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Raina Panda , Daniel Fein , Arpita Singhal , Mark Fiore , Maneesh Agrawala , Matyas Bohacek

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting language model activations by decomposing them into sparse, interpretable features. A popular approach is the TopK SAE, that uses a fixed number of the most active…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Bart Bussmann , Patrick Leask , Neel Nanda

Despite the advantages of their low-resource settings, traditional sparse retrievers depend on exact matching approaches between high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representations of both the queries and the collection. As a result,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Dahlia Shehata , Negar Arabzadeh , Charles L. A. Clarke

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised method for extracting sparse representations from language models, yet scalable training remains a significant challenge. We introduce a suite of 256 SAEs, trained on each…

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

Given a convolutional dictionary underlying a set of observed signals, can a carefully designed auto-encoder recover the dictionary in the presence of noise? We introduce an auto-encoder architecture, termed constrained recurrent sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-13 Bahareh Tolooshams , Sourav Dey , Demba Ba

Bottleneck autoencoders have been actively researched as a solution to image compression tasks. However, we observed that bottleneck autoencoders produce subjectively low quality reconstructed images. In this work, we explore the ability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-25 Yijing Watkins , Mohammad Sayeh , Oleksandr Iaroshenko , Garrett Kenyon

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract millions of interpretable features from a language model, but flat feature inventories aren't very useful on their own. Domain concepts get mixed with generic and weakly grounded features, while related…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 John Winnicki , Abeynaya Gnanasekaran , Eric Darve

Inverse materials design has proven successful in accelerating novel material discovery. Many inverse materials design methods use unsupervised learning where a latent space is learned to offer a compact description of materials…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Cheng Zeng , Zulqarnain Khan , Nathan L. Post

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a useful tool for interpreting the internal representations of neural networks. However, naively optimising SAEs for reconstruction loss and sparsity results in a preference for SAEs that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Kola Ayonrinde , Michael T. Pearce , Lee Sharkey

Text-to-image diffusion models generate images through an iterative denoising process, so internal neural layers produce trajectories of activations rather than single static representations. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Calvin Yeung , Prathyush Poduval , Ali Zakeri , Zhuowen Zou , Mohsen Imani

Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) is a family of neural methods that encode queries and documents into sparse lexical vectors that can be indexed and retrieved efficiently with an inverted index. We explore the application of LSR to the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Thong Nguyen , Mariya Hendriksen , Andrew Yates , Maarten de Rijke