English
Related papers

Related papers: Towards Interpretable Protein Structure Prediction…

200 papers

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mark Muchane , Sean Richardson , Kiho Park , Victor Veitch

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

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

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Krishna Kanth Nakka

EEG foundation models achieve state-of-the-art clinical performance, yet the internal computations driving their predictions remain opaque: a barrier to clinical trust. We apply TopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) across three architecturally…

Intermediate layers of large language models (LLMs) best predict human brain responses to language, one of the most robust findings in computational neurolinguistics, yet why remains mechanistically unexplained. We address this gap by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but these techniques require many expensive backward passes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Matthew Chen , Joshua Engels , Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable feature-level mechanistic interpretability and activation steering in large language models (LLMs), but SAE-based language control remains unreliable in multilingual settings: most SAEs are trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yusser Al Ghussin , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Patrick Schramowski , Simon Ostermann

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

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…

The Linear Representation Hypothesis asserts that the embeddings learned by neural networks can be understood as linear combinations of features corresponding to high-level concepts. Based on this ansatz, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chiraag Kaushik , Davis Barch , Andrea Fanelli

As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jiaming Li , Haoran Ye , Yukun Chen , Xinyue Li , Lei Zhang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Jimmy Chih-Hsien Peng , Min Yang

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

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 prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiangchen Song , Aashiq Muhamed , Yujia Zheng , Lingjing Kong , Zeyu Tang , Mona T. Diab , Virginia Smith , Kun Zhang

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 used to extract interpretable features from neural network representations, often under the implicit assumption that concepts correspond to independent linear directions. However, a growing body of…

Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dan Braun , Jordan Taylor , Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill , Lee Sharkey

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been widely used for interpretability of neural networks, but their learned features often vary across seeds and hyperparameter settings. We introduce Ordered Sparse Autoencoders (OSAE), which extend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Sophie L. Wang , Alex Quach , Nithin Parsan , John J. Yang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability to project LLM activations onto sparse latent spaces. However, sparsity alone is an imperfect proxy for interpretability, and current training objectives often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla