Related papers: Scaling sparse feature circuit finding for in-cont…
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…
Understanding the internal machinations of deep Transformer-based NLP models is more crucial than ever as these models see widespread use in various domains that affect the public at large, such as industry, academia, finance, health. While…
In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…
Existing zero-shot learning (ZSL) models typically learn a projection function from a feature space to a semantic embedding space (e.g.~attribute space). However, such a projection function is only concerned with predicting the training…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…
Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have become a prevalent tool for interpreting language models' inner workings. However, it is unknown how tightly SAE features correspond to computationally important directions in the model. This work…
Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research…
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":…
We introduce methods for discovering and applying sparse feature circuits. These are causally implicated subnetworks of human-interpretable features for explaining language model behaviors. Circuits identified in prior work consist of…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become central to mechanistic interpretability, decomposing transformer activations into monosemantic features. Yet existing analyses characterise features almost exclusively through top-activating token…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach in language model interpretability, offering unsupervised extraction of sparse features. For interpretability methods to succeed, they must identify abstract features across…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…
Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become central tools for interpretability, leveraging dictionary learning principles to extract sparse, interpretable features from neural representations whose underlying structure is typically…