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As AI models achieve remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, understanding what representations they learn and how they encode concepts has become increasingly important for both scientific progress and trustworthy deployment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yiming Tang , Harshvardhan Saini , Zhaoqian Yao , Zheng Lin , Yizhen Liao , Jingyi Cui , Yisen Wang , Mengnan Du , Dianbo Liu

Understanding and mitigating the potential risks associated with foundation models (FMs) hinges on developing effective interpretability methods. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for disentangling FM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Aashiq Muhamed , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith

Lexical and semantic matching capture different successful approaches to text retrieval and the fusion of their results has proven to be more effective and robust than either alone. Prior work performs hybrid retrieval by conducting lexical…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Sheng-Chieh Lin , Jimmy Lin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan

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

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

Despite their recent popularity and well-known advantages, dense retrievers still lag behind sparse methods such as BM25 in their ability to reliably match salient phrases and rare entities in the query and to generalize to out-of-domain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Xilun Chen , Kushal Lakhotia , Barlas Oğuz , Anchit Gupta , Patrick Lewis , Stan Peshterliev , Yashar Mehdad , Sonal Gupta , Wen-tau Yih

Internal activations of diffusion models encode rich semantic information, but interpreting such representations remains challenging. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in disentangling latent representations, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Boyang Wang , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

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

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a useful tool for interpreting the internal representations of neural networks. However, naively optimising SAEs for reconstruction loss and sparsity results in a preference for SAEs that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Kola Ayonrinde , Michael T. Pearce , Lee Sharkey

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Xuansheng Wu , Wenhao Yu , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

Word embeddings are a powerful natural language processing technique, but they are extremely difficult to interpret. To enable interpretable NLP models, we create vectors where each dimension is inherently interpretable. By inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Adly Templeton

Expansion-enhanced sparse lexical representation improves information retrieval (IR) by minimizing vocabulary mismatch problems during lexical matching. In this paper, we explore the potential of jointly learning dense semantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Biplob Biswas , Rajiv Ramnath

In recent years, dense retrieval has been the focus of information retrieval (IR) research. While effective, dense retrieval produces uninterpretable dense vectors, and suffers from the drawback of large index size. Learned sparse retrieval…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Zhichao Xu , Aosong Feng , Yijun Tian , Haibo Ding , Lin Lee Cheong

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Tue M. Cao , Nguyen Do , My T. Thai

Autoencoding has achieved great empirical success as a framework for learning generative models for natural images. Autoencoders often use generic deep networks as the encoder or decoder, which are difficult to interpret, and the learned…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Xili Dai , Ke Chen , Shengbang Tong , Jingyuan Zhang , Xingjian Gao , Mingyang Li , Druv Pai , Yuexiang Zhai , XIaojun Yuan , Heung-Yeung Shum , Lionel M. Ni , Yi Ma

Sparse dictionary learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful approach to extract semantically meaningful concepts from the internals of large language models (LLMs) trained mainly in the text domain. In this work, we explore whether DL can…

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 gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo