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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to disentangle the dense, polysemantic internal representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable, monosemantic concepts. However, standard $\ell_1$-regularized SAEs suffer from feature…
Learning rich data representations from unlabeled data is a key challenge towards applying deep learning algorithms in downstream tasks. Several variants of variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been proposed to learn compact data…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) hold great potential for modelling text, as they could in theory separate high-level semantic and syntactic properties from local regularities of natural language. Practically, however, VAEs with…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool for analyzing and interpreting the activation space of transformer-based language models (LMs). However, SAEs suffer several shortcomings that diminish their utility and internal…
High resolution galaxy spectra contain much information about galactic physics, but the high dimensionality of these spectra makes it difficult to fully utilize the information they contain. We apply variational autoencoders (VAEs), a…
The ability of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to learn disentangled representations has made them popular for practical applications. However, their behaviour is not yet fully understood. For example, the questions of when they can provide…
Variational autoencoders (VAE) represent a popular, flexible form of deep generative model that can be stochastically fit to samples from a given random process using an information-theoretic variational bound on the true underlying…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to extracting features from neural networks, enabling model interpretability as well as causal interventions on model internals. SAEs generate sparse feature representations using a…
In the last few years there have been important advancements in generative models with the two dominant approaches being Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). However, standard Autoencoders (AEs) and…
We present the first systematic study of Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) on video representations. Standard SAEs decompose video into interpretable, monosemantic features but destroy temporal coherence: hard TopK selection produces unstable…
Latent steering exploits internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide generation, yet interventions on dense states can entangle distinct semantic features. In this paper, we investigate attention query activations as a…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…
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…
Software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and SQL injections are a major source of security breaches. Traditional methods for vulnerability detection remain essential but are limited by high false positive rates, scalability issues,…
A popular new method in mechanistic interpretability is to train high-dimensional sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on neuron activations and use SAE features as the atomic units of analysis. However, the body of evidence on whether SAE feature…
Recovering meaningful concepts from language model activations is a central aim of interpretability. While existing feature extraction methods aim to identify concepts that are independent directions, it is unclear if this assumption can…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been used extensively to discover low-dimensional latent factors governing neural activity and animal behavior. However, without careful model selection, the uncovered latent factors may reflect noise in…
We propose a framework for the statistical evaluation of variational auto-encoders (VAEs) and test two instances of this framework in the context of modelling images of handwritten digits and a corpus of English text. Our take on evaluation…
We present the development of a semi-supervised regression method using variational autoencoders (VAE), which is customized for use in soft sensing applications. We motivate the use of semi-supervised learning considering the fact that…