English
Related papers

Related papers: Evaluating and Designing Sparse Autoencoders by Ap…

200 papers

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) trained on large language model activations output thousands of features that enable mapping to human-interpretable concepts. The current practice for analyzing these features primarily relies on inspecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Wilson E. Marcílio-Jr , Danilo M. Eler

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven effective for extracting monosemantic features from large language models (LLMs), yet these features are typically identified in isolation. However, broad evidence suggests that LLMs capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yifan Luo , Yang Zhan , Jiedong Jiang , Tianyang Liu , Mingrui Wu , Zhennan Zhou , Bin Dong

Standard Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) excel at discovering a dictionary of a model's learned features, offering a powerful observational lens. However, the ambiguous and ungrounded nature of these features makes them unreliable instruments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Jianrong Ding , Muxi Chen , Chenchen Zhao , Qiang Xu

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Harry Mayne , Yushi Yang , Adam Mahdi

Text-to-image diffusion models generate images through an iterative denoising process, so internal neural layers produce trajectories of activations rather than single static representations. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Calvin Yeung , Prathyush Poduval , Ali Zakeri , Zhuowen Zou , Mohsen Imani

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

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

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

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 have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting the internal representations of Large Language Models, yet they often fail to capture domain-specific features not prevalent in their training corpora. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Nikita Koriagin , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Laptev , Gleb Gerasimov , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Jacob S. Prince , Matthew Kowal , Victor Boutin , Isabel Papadimitriou , Binxu Wang , Martin Wattenberg , Demba Ba , Talia Konkle

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

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models often exhibit gender bias, particularly by generating stereotypical associations between professions and gendered subjects. This paper presents SAE Debias, a lightweight and model-agnostic framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Chao Wu , Zhenyi Wang , Kangxian Xie , Naresh Kumar Devulapally , Vishnu Suresh Lokhande , Mingchen Gao

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret the internal activations of large language models (LLMs) by mapping them to human-interpretable concept representations. While existing evaluations of SAEs focus on metrics such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Aaron J. Li , Suraj Srinivas , Usha Bhalla , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Steering has emerged as a promising approach in controlling large language models (LLMs) without modifying model parameters. However, most existing steering methods rely on large-scale datasets to learn clear behavioral information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anyi Wang , Xuansheng Wu , Dong Shu , Yunpu Ma , Ninghao Liu

One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is \textit{polysemanticity}, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Hoagy Cunningham , Aidan Ewart , Logan Riggs , Robert Huben , Lee Sharkey

Sparse autoencoders are usually trained one layer at a time, even though transformer residual stream activations are strongly coupled across depth. This creates a practical problem for multi-layer interventions: different layerwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Prathyush Poduval , Calvin Yeung , Neel Desai , Mohsen Imani

Understanding the general priniciples behind transformer models remains a complex endeavor. Experiments with probing and disentangling features using sparse autoencoders (SAE) suggest that these models might manage linear features embedded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Johannes Knittel , Tushaar Gangavarapu , Hendrik Strobelt , Hanspeter Pfister

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are useful for detecting and steering interpretable features in neural networks, with particular potential for understanding complex multimodal representations. Given their ability to uncover interpretable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vladimir Zaigrajew , Hubert Baniecki , Przemyslaw Biecek

Sparse Neural Networks (SNNs) can potentially demonstrate similar performance to their dense counterparts while saving significant energy and memory at inference. However, the accuracy drop incurred by SNNs, especially at high pruning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Mohammad Loni , Aditya Mohan , Mehdi Asadi , Marius Lindauer
‹ Prev 1 8 9 10 Next ›