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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) decompose large language model (LLM) activations into latent features that reveal mechanistic structure. Conventional SAEs train on broad data distributions, forcing a fixed latent budget to capture only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Charles O'Neill , Mudith Jayasekara , Max Kirkby

Protein language models have revolutionized structure prediction, but their nonlinear nature obscures how sequence representations inform structure prediction. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a path to interpretability here by…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-13 Nithin Parsan , David J. Yang , John J. Yang

Vision-language models learn powerful multimodal embeddings, yet their internal semantics remain opaque. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features, they rely on expanding the representation dimension, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Piotr Kubaty , Patryk Marszałek , Łukasz Struski , Adam Wróbel , Jacek Tabor , Marek Śmieja

One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is \textit{polysemanticity}, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Hoagy Cunningham , Aidan Ewart , Logan Riggs , Robert Huben , Lee Sharkey

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

Large language models have simplified the production of personalized translations reflecting predefined stylistic constraints. However, these systems still struggle when stylistic requirements are implicitly represented by a set of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Daniel Scalena , Gabriele Sarti , Arianna Bisazza , Elisabetta Fersini , Malvina Nissim

Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Zhengxuan Wu , Aryaman Arora , Atticus Geiger , Zheng Wang , Jing Huang , Dan Jurafsky , Christopher D. Manning , Christopher Potts

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for disentangling feature superposition in transformer-based architectures, enabling precise control via activation steering. However, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yunpeng Zhou

It has been long known that sparsity is an effective inductive bias for learning efficient representation of data in vectors with fixed dimensionality, and it has been explored in many areas of representation learning. Of particular…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Victor Prokhorov , Yingzhen Li , Ehsan Shareghi , Nigel Collier

Transformer-based models generate hidden states that are difficult to interpret. In this work, we analyze hidden states and modify them at inference, with a focus on motion forecasting. We use linear probing to analyze whether interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Omer Sahin Tas , Royden Wagner

LLMs increasingly require surgical model editing to enhance domain-specific capabilities without incurring the computational cost or catastrophic forgetting associated with full fine-tuning. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Li Lei , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting large language models (LLMs) by decomposing token activations into combinations of human-understandable features. While SAEs provide crucial insights into LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhen Xu , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Kaidi Xu , Tianlong Chen

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

Sparse autoencoders are a promising new approach for decomposing language model activations for interpretation and control. They have been applied successfully to vision transformer image encoders and to small-scale diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Stepan Shabalin , Ayush Panda , Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Abdur Raheem Ali , Yixiong Hao , Arthur Conmy

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) that can accurately reconstruct their input (minimizing distortion) by making efficient use of few features (minimizing the rate) often fail to learn monosemantic representations (highly interpretable), limiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tommaso Mencattini , Francesco Montagna , Francesco Locatello

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Constantin Venhoff , Anisoara Calinescu , Philip Torr , Christian Schroeder de Witt

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can efficiently identify candidate monosemantic features from pretrained neural networks for galaxy morphology. We demonstrate this on Euclid Q1 images using both supervised (Zoobot) and new self-supervised (MAE)…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-11-13 John F. Wu , Michael Walmsley

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo and Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Seonglae Cho , Harryn Oh , Donghyun Lee , Luis Eduardo Rodrigues Vieira , Andrew Bermingham , Ziad El Sayed