Related papers: Sparse autoencoders reveal selective remapping of …
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…
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,…
Interpretability is critical in high-stakes domains such as medical imaging, where understanding model decisions is essential for clinical adoption. In this work, we introduce Sparse Autoencoder (SAE)-based interpretability to breast…
While vision models are highly capable, their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood -- a challenge which sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have helped address in language, but which remains underexplored in vision. We address this gap by…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have lately been used to uncover interpretable latent features in large language models. By projecting dense embeddings into a much higher-dimensional and sparse space, learned features become disentangled and…
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…
Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed as an unsupervised approach to learn a decomposition of a model's latent space. This enables useful applications such as steering - influencing the output of a model towards a desired concept -…
Understanding the multilingual mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) provides insight into how they process different languages, yet this remains challenging. Existing studies often focus on individual neurons, but their polysemantic…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been used widely to decompose and interpret neural network activations, especially those of transformer language models. One key issue with SAEs is their inability to directly model multidimensional features.…
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…
Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract human-interpretable features from deep neural networks by transforming their activations into a sparse, higher dimensional latent space, and then reconstructing the activations from these latents.…
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…