Related papers: SAEs Are Good for Steering -- If You Select the Ri…
Sparse Autoencoders have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting the internal representations of Large Language Models, yet they often fail to capture domain-specific features not prevalent in their training corpora. This paper…
Learning hierarchical features in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) is essential for capturing the structured nature of real-world data and mitigating issues like feature absorption or splitting. Existing works attempt to identify hierarchical…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a core interpretability tool for large language models, and progress on SAE architectures depends on benchmarks that reliably distinguish better SAEs from worse ones. We audit the SAE quality metrics in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) encode factual knowledge within hidden parametric spaces that are difficult to inspect or control. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can decompose hidden activations into more fine-grained, interpretable…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…
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) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…
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…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…
Recent work on sparse autoencoders (SAEs) has shown promise in extracting interpretable features from neural networks and addressing challenges with polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. In this paper, we apply SAEs to the early…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…
Standard Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) excel at discovering a dictionary of a model's learned features, offering a powerful observational lens. However, the ambiguous and ungrounded nature of these features makes them unreliable instruments…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract sparse, interpretable latents from transformer activations. We test whether commonly used SAE quality metrics and automatic explanation pipelines can distinguish trained transformers…
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…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…
Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…
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…