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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) aim to decompose the activation space of large language models (LLMs) into human-interpretable latent directions or features. As we increase the number of features in the SAE, hierarchical features tend to split…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 David Chanin , James Wilken-Smith , Tomáš Dulka , Hardik Bhatnagar , Satvik Golechha , Joseph Bloom

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Kenny Peng , Rajiv Movva , Jon Kleinberg , Emma Pierson , Nikhil Garg

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are useful for detecting and steering interpretable features in neural networks, with particular potential for understanding complex multimodal representations. Given their ability to uncover interpretable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vladimir Zaigrajew , Hubert Baniecki , Przemyslaw Biecek

Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aleksandar Makelov , George Lange , Neel Nanda

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Charles O'Neill , Alim Gumran , David Klindt

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to steer large language models (LLMs), based on the assumption that their interpretable features naturally enable effective model behavior steering. Yet, a fundamental question remains unanswered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xu Wang , Yan Hu , Benyou Wang , Difan Zou

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode factual knowledge within hidden parametric spaces that are difficult to inspect or control. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can decompose hidden activations into more fine-grained, interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural networks by identifying meaningful concepts from their representations. However, do SAEs truly uncover all concepts a model relies on, or are they inherently biased toward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Sai Sumedh R. Hindupur , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Thomas Fel , Demba Ba

Translating the internal representations and computations of models into concepts that humans can understand is a key goal of interpretability. While recent dictionary learning methods such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Usha Bhalla , Alex Oesterling , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio P. Calmon

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach in language model interpretability, offering unsupervised extraction of sparse features. For interpretability methods to succeed, they must identify abstract features across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Lovis Heindrich , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez , Veronika Thost

To truly understand vision models, we must not only interpret their learned features but also validate these interpretations through controlled experiments. While earlier work offers either rich semantics or direct control, few post-hoc…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Wei-Lun Chao , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Understanding and mitigating the potential risks associated with foundation models (FMs) hinges on developing effective interpretability methods. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for disentangling FM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Aashiq Muhamed , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith