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LLMs are increasingly being used in healthcare. This promises to free physicians from drudgery, enabling better care to be delivered at scale. But the use of LLMs in this space also brings risks; for example, such models may worsen existing…
Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting language model activations by decomposing them into sparse, interpretable features. A popular approach is the TopK SAE, that uses a fixed number of the most active…
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…
We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing Large Langage Models (LLM) activations into interpretable latents. However, due to their substantial training cost, most academic research uses open-source SAEs which are only…
While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…
A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for decomposing language model representations into interpretable features. Current interpretation methods infer feature semantics from activation patterns, but overlook that…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to interpreting the internal representations of transformer language models. However, SAEs are usually trained separately on each transformer layer, making it difficult to use them to…
A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…
The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…
A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a standard tool for mechanistic interpretability in autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling researchers to extract sparse, human-interpretable features and intervene on model behavior.…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there…
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…