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Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially advanced the automation of software engineering (SE) tasks, enabling complex activities such as code generation and code summarization. However, the black-box nature of LLMs…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Antonio Vitale , Khai-Nguyen Nguyen , Denys Poshyvanyk , Rocco Oliveto , Simone Scalabrino , Antonio Mastropaolo

Large language models (LLMs) are not amenable to frequent re-training, due to high training costs arising from their massive scale. However, updates are necessary to endow LLMs with new skills and keep them up-to-date with rapidly evolving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Tongtong Wu , Linhao Luo , Yuan-Fang Li , Shirui Pan , Thuy-Trang Vu , Gholamreza Haffari

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capability in diverse software engineering tasks. However, feature-driven development, a highly prevalent real-world task that involves developing new functionalities for large, existing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Yaxin Du , Yuzhu Cai , Yifan Zhou , Cheng Wang , Yu Qian , Xianghe Pang , Qian Liu , Yue Hu , Siheng Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without task-specific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Xinwei Wu , Heng Liu , Xiaohu Zhao , Yuqi Ren , Linlong Xu , Longyue Wang , Deyi Xiong , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

Recent studies have shown that the outputs from large language models (LLMs) can often reveal the identity of their source model. While this is a natural consequence of LLMs modeling the distribution of their training data, such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Teppei Suzuki , Ryokan Ri , Sho Takase

Large Language Model (LLM) deployment requires guiding the LLM to recognize and not answer unsafe prompts while complying with safe prompts. Previous methods for achieving this require adjusting model weights along with other expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Samaksh Bhargav , Zining Zhu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are one of the main methods to interpret the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs), decomposing activations into higher-dimensional features. However, they exhibit critical shortcomings where a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michał Brzozowski , Neo Christopher Chung

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

With the integration of image modality, the semantic space of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is more complex than text-only models, making their interpretability more challenging and their alignment less stable, particularly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Hantao Lou , Changye Li , Jiaming Ji , Yaodong Yang

The representation of feature space is a crucial environment where data points get vectorized and embedded for subsequent modeling. Thus the efficacy of machine learning (ML) algorithms is closely related to the quality of feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Xinhao Zhang , Jinghan Zhang , Banafsheh Rekabdar , Yuanchun Zhou , Pengfei Wang , Kunpeng Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced dialogue systems and role-playing agents through their ability to generate human-like text. While prior studies have shown that LLMs can exhibit distinct and consistent personalities,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shu Yang , Shenzhe Zhu , Liang Liu , Lijie Hu , Mengdi Li , Di Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Arthur Conmy , Lewis Smith , Tom Lieberum , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Rohin Shah , Neel Nanda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose \textsc{Mutual Feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Luke Marks , Alasdair Paren , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xuan Yang , Jiayu Liu , Yuhang Lai , Hao Xu , Zhenya Huang , Ning Miao

Feature transformation aims to reconstruct the feature space of raw features to enhance the performance of downstream models. However, the exponential growth in the combinations of features and operations poses a challenge, making it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Nanxu Gong , Chandan K. Reddy , Wangyang Ying , Haifeng Chen , Yanjie Fu

Recent work shows that Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) applied to large language model (LLM) layers have neurons corresponding to interpretable concepts. These SAE neurons can be modified to align generated outputs, but only towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ananya Joshi , Celia Cintas , Skyler Speakman

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