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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

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) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Adam Karvonen , Can Rager , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Gonçalo Paulo , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

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 -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Yonatan Belinkov

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely employed for mechanistic interpretability and model steering. Within this context, steering is by design performed by means of decoding altered SAE intermediate representations. This procedure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Antonio Bărbălau , Cristian Daniel Păduraru , Teodor Poncu , Alexandru Tifrea , Elena Burceanu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring how interpretable they are remains challenging, with weak consensus about which benchmarks to use. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Subhash Kantamneni , Joshua Engels , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Max Tegmark , Neel Nanda

Recent work on sparse autoencoders (SAEs) has shown promise in extracting interpretable features from neural networks and addressing challenges with polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. In this paper, we apply SAEs to the early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Liv Gorton

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Sonia Joseph , Praneet Suresh , Ethan Goldfarb , Lorenz Hufe , Yossi Gandelsman , Robert Graham , Danilo Bzdok , Wojciech Samek , Blake Aaron Richards

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are powerful tools for interpreting neural representations, yet their use in audio remains underexplored. We train SAEs across all encoder layers of Whisper and HuBERT, provide an extensive evaluation of their…

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

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 uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Javier Ferrando , Enrique Lopez-Cuena , Pablo Agustin Martin-Torres , Daniel Hinjos , Anna Arias-Duart , Dario Garcia-Gasulla

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sangyu Han , Yearim Kim , Nojun Kwak