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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised method for extracting sparse representations from language models, yet scalable training remains a significant challenge. We introduce a suite of 256 SAEs, trained on each…

Pathology plays an important role in disease diagnosis, treatment decision-making and drug development. Previous works on interpretability for machine learning models on pathology images have revolved around methods such as attention value…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose large language model representations into interpretable features, but how these features interact under uncertainty remains poorly understood. We introduce Feature Rivalry -- negatively correlated SAE…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Harshavardhan

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

Intermediate layers of large language models (LLMs) best predict human brain responses to language, one of the most robust findings in computational neurolinguistics, yet why remains mechanistically unexplained. We address this gap by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Piotr Jedryszek , Oliver M. Crook

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

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Dongsheng Wang , Jinsen Zhang , Dawei Su , Hui Huang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

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) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for disentangling feature superposition in transformer-based architectures, enabling precise control via activation steering. However, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yunpeng Zhou

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability research for large language models; however, the state-of-the-art method of using $k$-sparse autoencoders lacks a theoretical grounding for selecting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sewoong Lee , Adam Davies , Marc E. Canby , Julia Hockenmaier

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

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

To truly understand vision models, we must not only interpret their learned features but also validate these interpretations through controlled experiments. While earlier work offers either rich semantics or direct control, few post-hoc…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Wei-Lun Chao , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Philipp Wesp , Robbie Holland , Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa , Sergios Gatidis