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Understanding what sparse auto-encoder (SAE) features in vision transformers truly represent is usually done by inspecting the patches where a feature's activation is highest. However, self-attention mixes information across the entire…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sangyu Han , Yearim Kim , Nojun Kwak

The fidelity with which neural networks can now generate content such as music presents a scientific opportunity: these systems appear to have learned implicit theories of such content's structure through statistical learning alone. This…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Nikhil Singh , Manuel Cherep , Pattie Maes

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xudong Zhu , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili , Zhihui Zhu

Transformer models have become state-of-the-art in decoding stimuli and behavior from neural activity, significantly advancing neuroscience research. Yet greater transparency in their decision-making processes would substantially enhance…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2025-06-18 Laurence Freeman , Philip Shamash , Vinam Arora , Caswell Barry , Tiago Branco , Eva Dyer

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown to find interpretable features in neural networks from polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. Previous work has shown SAEs are an effective tool to extract interpretable features from the early…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Matthew Bozoukov

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose large language model (LLM) activations into latent features that reveal mechanistic structure. Conventional SAEs train on broad data distributions, forcing a fixed latent budget to capture only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Charles O'Neill , Mudith Jayasekara , Max Kirkby

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are useful for detecting and steering interpretable features in neural networks, with particular potential for understanding complex multimodal representations. Given their ability to uncover interpretable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vladimir Zaigrajew , Hubert Baniecki , Przemyslaw Biecek

EEG foundation models achieve state-of-the-art clinical performance, yet the internal computations driving their predictions remain opaque: a barrier to clinical trust. We apply TopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) across three architecturally…

Deep neural networks achieve impressive performance but remain difficult to interpret and control. We present SALVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Latent Vector Editing), a unified "discover, validate, and control" framework that bridges mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Vegard Flovik

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have become the backbone of modern image editing, yet text prompts alone do not offer adequate control over the editing process. Two properties are especially desirable: disentanglement, where…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ronen Kamenetsky , Sara Dorfman , Daniel Garibi , Roni Paiss , Or Patashnik , Daniel Cohen-Or

LLMs increasingly require surgical model editing to enhance domain-specific capabilities without incurring the computational cost or catastrophic forgetting associated with full fine-tuning. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Li Lei , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

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 autoencoders (SAEs) aim to disentangle model activations into monosemantic, human-interpretable features. In practice, learned features are often redundant and vary across training runs and sparsity levels, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Cristina P. Martin-Linares , Jonathan P. Ling

In contrast to fully-supervised models, self-supervised representation learning only needs a fraction of data to be labeled and often achieves the same or even higher downstream performance. The goal is to pre-train deep neural networks on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Friederike Baier , Sebastian Mair , Samuel G. Fadel

Zero-day attack detection plays a critical role in mitigating risks, protecting assets, and staying ahead in the evolving threat landscape. This study explores the application of stacked autoencoder (SAE), a type of artificial neural…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Mahmut Tokmak , Mike Nkongolo

We propose to learn model invariances as a means of interpreting a model. This is motivated by a reverse engineering principle. If we understand a problem, we may introduce inductive biases in our model in the form of invariances.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 An-phi Nguyen , María Rodríguez Martínez

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models often exhibit gender bias, particularly by generating stereotypical associations between professions and gendered subjects. This paper presents SAE Debias, a lightweight and model-agnostic framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Chao Wu , Zhenyi Wang , Kangxian Xie , Naresh Kumar Devulapally , Vishnu Suresh Lokhande , Mingchen Gao

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose neural activations into interpretable features. A widely adopted variant, the TopK SAE, reconstructs each token from its K most active latents. However, this approach is inefficient, as some tokens carry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Narmeen Oozeer , Nirmalendu Prakash , Michael Lan , Alice Rigg , Amirali Abdullah

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability to project LLM activations onto sparse latent spaces. However, sparsity alone is an imperfect proxy for interpretability, and current training objectives often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Xu Wang , Bingqing Jiang , Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Lingpeng Kong , Difan Zou