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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

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Abhinav Menon , Manish Shrivastava , David Krueger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

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

Scientific archives now contain hundreds of petabytes of data across genomics, ecology, climate, and molecular biology that could reveal undiscovered patterns if systematically analyzed at scale. Large-scale, weakly-supervised datasets in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Jacob Beattie , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

Understanding and mitigating the potential risks associated with foundation models (FMs) hinges on developing effective interpretability methods. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for disentangling FM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Aashiq Muhamed , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been used widely to decompose and interpret neural network activations, especially those of transformer language models. One key issue with SAEs is their inability to directly model multidimensional features.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Collin Francel

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ege Erdogan , Ana Lucic

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jack Gallifant , Shan Chen , Kuleen Sasse , Hugo Aerts , Thomas Hartvigsen , Danielle S. Bitterman

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…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose neural activations into interpretable features. A widely adopted variant, the TopK SAE, reconstructs each token from its K most active latents. However, this approach is inefficient, as some tokens carry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Narmeen Oozeer , Nirmalendu Prakash , Michael Lan , Alice Rigg , Amirali Abdullah

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo and Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Seonglae Cho , Harryn Oh , Donghyun Lee , Luis Eduardo Rodrigues Vieira , Andrew Bermingham , Ziad El Sayed

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Tom Lieberum , Nicolas Sonnerat , Arthur Conmy , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular technique for interpreting language model activations, and there is extensive recent work on improving SAE effectiveness. However, most prior work evaluates progress using unsupervised proxy metrics…

Although sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are crucial for identifying interpretable features in neural networks, it is still challenging to distinguish between real computational patterns and erroneous correlations. We introduce Model-X knockoffs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Tsogt-Ochir Enkhbayar

Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-10 Omar Claflin

We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Eoin Farrell , Yeu-Tong Lau , Arthur Conmy

Predicting protein function from amino acid sequence remains a central challenge in data-scarce (low-$N$) regimes, limiting machine learning-guided protein design when only small amounts of assay-labeled sequence-function data are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Darin Tsui , Kunal Talreja , Amirali Aghazadeh

Existing works are dedicated to untangling atomized numerical components (features) from the hidden states of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they typically rely on autoencoders constrained by some training-time regularization on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hakaze Cho , Haolin Yang , Yanshu Li , Brian M. Kurkoski , Naoya Inoue

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