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Related papers: BatchTopK Sparse Autoencoders

200 papers

Improving Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) requires benchmarks that can precisely validate architectural innovations. However, current SAE benchmarks on LLMs are often too noisy to differentiate architectural improvements, and current synthetic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

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 recently become central tools for interpretability, leveraging dictionary learning principles to extract sparse, interpretable features from neural representations whose underlying structure is typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

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

We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 George Ma , Zhongyuan Liang , Irene Y. Chen , Somayeh Sojoudi

The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Edith Natalia Villegas Garcia , Alessio Ansuini

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

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zirui He , Haiyan Zhao , Yiran Qiao , Fan Yang , Ali Payani , Jing Ma , Mengnan Du

In this paper we propose Structuring AutoEncoders (SAE). SAEs are neural networks which learn a low dimensional representation of data which are additionally enriched with a desired structure in this low dimensional space. While traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Marco Rudolph , Bastian Wandt , Bodo Rosenhahn

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Tue M. Cao , Nguyen Do , My T. Thai

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

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

Fine-tuning pre-trained transformers is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of base models on specific tasks. From early applications in models like BERT to fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), this approach has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Suneel Nadipalli

A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Moghis Fereidouni , Muhammad Umair Haider , Peizhong Ju , A. B. Siddique

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

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

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Atahan Dokme , Sriram Vishwanath

Many current state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendations are based on transformer architectures. Interpretation and explanation of such black box models is an important research question, as a better understanding of their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Anton Klenitskiy , Konstantin Polev , Daria Denisova , Alexey Vasilev , Dmitry Simakov , Gleb Gusev