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Understanding the internal representations of large language models is crucial for ensuring their reliability and safety, with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerging as a promising interpretability approach. However, current SAE training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 T. Ed Li , Junyu Ren

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for decomposing language model representations into interpretable features. Current interpretation methods infer feature semantics from activation patterns, but overlook that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yiting Liu , Zhi-Hong Deng

Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

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) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Tom Lieberum , Nicolas Sonnerat , Arthur Conmy , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Neel Nanda

Understanding how features evolve across layers in deep neural networks is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability, particularly due to polysemanticity and feature superposition. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Nikita Balagansky , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

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

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

A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Moghis Fereidouni , Muhammad Umair Haider , Peizhong Ju , A. B. Siddique

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

A common goal of mechanistic interpretability is to decompose the activations of neural networks into features: interpretable properties of the input computed by the model. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for finding these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Patrick Leask , Bart Bussmann , Michael Pearce , Joseph Bloom , Curt Tigges , Noura Al Moubayed , Lee Sharkey , Neel Nanda

Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Philipp Wesp , Robbie Holland , Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa , Sergios Gatidis

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 autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of their interpretations due to the lack of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Subhash Kantamneni , Joshua Engels , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Max Tegmark , Neel Nanda

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

We introduce sparse autoencoder neural operators (SAE-NOs), a new class of sparse autoencoders that operate in function spaces rather than fixed-dimensional Euclidean representations. We formalize the functional representation hypothesis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bahareh Tolooshams , Ailsa Shen , Anima Anandkumar

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

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng