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While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) successfully extract interpretable features from language models, applying them to audio generation faces unique challenges: audio's dense nature requires compression that obscures semantic meaning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Nathan Paek , Yongyi Zang , Qihui Yang , Randal Leistikow

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Piotr Jedryszek , Oliver M. Crook

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Constantin Venhoff , Anisoara Calinescu , Philip Torr , Christian Schroeder de Witt

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to extracting features from neural networks, enabling model interpretability as well as causal interventions on model internals. SAEs generate sparse feature representations using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Kola Ayonrinde

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

Artistic style transfer in generative models remains a significant challenge, as existing methods often introduce style only via model fine-tuning, additional adapters, or prompt engineering, all of which can be computationally expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Raina Panda , Daniel Fein , Arpita Singhal , Mark Fiore , Maneesh Agrawala , Matyas Bohacek

Recent interpretability work on large language models (LLMs) has been increasingly dominated by a feature-discovery approach with the help of proxy modules. Then, the quality of features learned by, e.g., sparse auto-encoders (SAEs), is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mengyu Ye , Jun Suzuki , Tatsuro Inaba , Tatsuki Kuribayashi

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network's internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jeffrey Olmo , Jared Wilson , Max Forsey , Bryce Hepner , Thomas Vin Howe , David Wingate

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

It is assumed that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic activations into interpretable linear directions, as long as the activations are composed of sparse linear combinations of underlying features. However, we find that if an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 David Chanin , Tomáš Dulka , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yi Jing , Zijun Yao , Hongzhu Guo , Lingxu Ran , Xiaozhi Wang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) \citep{bricken2023monosemanticity,gao2024scalingevaluatingsparseautoencoders} rely on dictionary learning to extract interpretable features from neural networks at scale in an unsupervised manner, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Hans Peter , Anders Søgaard

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

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…

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

Adapting foundation models for specific purposes has become a standard approach to build machine learning systems for downstream applications. Yet, it is an open question which mechanisms take place during adaptation. Here we develop a new…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Hyesu Lim , Jinho Choi , Jaegul Choo , Steffen Schneider

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

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…