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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a technique for sparse decomposition of neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, current SAEs suffer from feature absorption, where specialized features capture instances of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Elena Tutubalina , Ivan Oseledets

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract features from LLM internal activations, meant to correspond to interpretable concepts. A core SAE training hyperparameter is L0: how many SAE features should fire per token on average. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable interpretability research by decomposing entangled model activations into monosemantic features. However, under what circumstances SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety, a low-frequency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jiaqi Weng , Han Zheng , Hanyu Zhang , Ej Zhou , Qinqin He , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Zhixuan Chu , Xiting Wang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a powerful dictionary learning technique for decomposing neural network activations, translating the hidden state into human ideas with high semantic value despite no external intervention or guidance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Albert Miao , Chenliang Zhou , Jiawei Zhou , Cengiz Oztireli

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…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Dan Pluth , Zachary Nicholas Houghton , Yu Zhou , Vijay K. Gurbani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yiting Liu , Zhi-Hong Deng

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for extracting human-interpretable features from neural networks activations. Previous works compared different models based on SAE-derived features but those comparisons have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Clément Cornet , Romaric Besançon , Hervé Le Borgne

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

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

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

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 autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

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

One of the most significant challenges in the field of software code auditing is the presence of vulnerabilities in software source code. Every year, more and more software flaws are discovered, either internally in proprietary code or…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Mst Shapna Akter , Hossain Shahriar , Juan Rodriguez Cardenas , Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed , Alfredo Cuzzocrea

Sensitive directions experiments attempt to understand the computational features of Language Models (LMs) by measuring how much the next token prediction probabilities change by perturbing activations along specific directions. We extend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Daniel J. Lee , Stefan Heimersheim

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

Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but often lack interpretability and controllability. This paper introduces a novel approach using sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret and control dense embeddings via the learned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hao Kang , Tevin Wang , Chenyan Xiong

Instruction tuning data are often quantity-saturated due to the large volume of data collection and fast model iteration, leaving data selection important but underexplored. Existing quality-driven data selection methods, such as LIMA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Xianjun Yang , Shaoliang Nie , Lijuan Liu , Suchin Gururangan , Ujjwal Karn , Rui Hou , Madian Khabsa , Yuning Mao