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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a predominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, aiming to identify interpretable monosemantic features. However, how does sparse encoding organize the representations of activation vector from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wenjie Sun , Bingzhe Wu , Zhile Yang , Chengke Wu

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that SAEs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Edith Natalia Villegas Garcia , Alessio Ansuini

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

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

Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Zhengxuan Wu , Aryaman Arora , Atticus Geiger , Zheng Wang , Jing Huang , Dan Jurafsky , Christopher D. Manning , Christopher Potts

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP demonstrate remarkable zero-shot performance across diverse tasks. However, fine-tuning these models to improve downstream performance often degrades robustness against distribution…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Fabian Morelli , Arnas Uselis , Ankit Sonthalia , Seong Joon Oh

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract activation directions for inference-time steering, but their standard sparsity objective treats latent features as independent. This prior can be poorly matched to high-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jehyeok Yeon , Federico Cinus , Yifan Wu , Luca Luceri

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to discover sparse and human-interpretable representations of the latent activations of LLMs. However, we would ultimately like to understand the computations performed by LLMs and not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Lucy Farnik , Tim Lawson , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) successfully extract interpretable features from language models, applying them to audio generation faces unique challenges: audio's dense nature requires compression that obscures semantic meaning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Nathan Paek , Yongyi Zang , Qihui Yang , Randal Leistikow

Protein language models have revolutionized structure prediction, but their nonlinear nature obscures how sequence representations inform structure prediction. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a path to interpretability here by…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-13 Nithin Parsan , David J. Yang , John J. Yang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yunpeng Zhou

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Zirui He , Mingyu Jin , Bo Shen , Ali Payani , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

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) have emerged as a promising approach for learning interpretable features from neural network activations. However, the optimization landscape for SAE training can be challenging due to correlations in the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ashwin Saraswatula , David Klindt

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

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