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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract interpretable features from neural network representations, often under the implicit assumption that concepts correspond to independent linear directions. However, a growing body of…

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

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

Intermediate layers of large language models (LLMs) best predict human brain responses to language, one of the most robust findings in computational neurolinguistics, yet why remains mechanistically unexplained. We address this gap by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Instruction tuning data are often quantity-saturated due to the large volume of data collection and fast model iteration, leaving data selection important but underexplored. Existing quality-driven data selection methods, such as LIMA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Xianjun Yang , Shaoliang Nie , Lijuan Liu , Suchin Gururangan , Ujjwal Karn , Rui Hou , Madian Khabsa , Yuning Mao

Understanding what sparse auto-encoder (SAE) features in vision transformers truly represent is usually done by inspecting the patches where a feature's activation is highest. However, self-attention mixes information across the entire…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sangyu Han , Yearim Kim , Nojun Kwak

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Seonglae Cho , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama

Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Javier Ferrando , Enrique Lopez-Cuena , Pablo Agustin Martin-Torres , Daniel Hinjos , Anna Arias-Duart , Dario Garcia-Gasulla

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown to find interpretable features in neural networks from polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. Previous work has shown SAEs are an effective tool to extract interpretable features from the early…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Matthew Bozoukov

Scientific archives now contain hundreds of petabytes of data across genomics, ecology, climate, and molecular biology that could reveal undiscovered patterns if systematically analyzed at scale. Large-scale, weakly-supervised datasets in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Jacob Beattie , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

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

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 recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mateusz Pach , Shyamgopal Karthik , Quentin Bouniot , Serge Belongie , Zeynep Akata

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpreting language model activations. A key evaluation metric is the increase in cross-entropy loss between the original model logits and the reconstructed model logits when replacing model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Adam Karvonen

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 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

We introduce a novel nonlinear model, Sparse Adaptive Bottleneck Centroid-Encoder (SABCE), for determining the features that discriminate between two or more classes. The algorithm aims to extract discriminatory features in groups while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Tomojit Ghosh , Michael Kirby

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Matthew Levinson

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jeremy Budd , Javier Ideami , Benjamin Macdowall Rynne , Keith Duggar , Randall Balestriero