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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of their interpretations due to the lack of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Subhash Kantamneni , Joshua Engels , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Max Tegmark , Neel Nanda

Despite Large Language Models' remarkable capabilities, understanding their internal representations remains challenging. Mechanistic interpretability tools such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) were developed to extract interpretable features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Xiangchen Song , Jiaqi Sun , Zijian Li , Yujia Zheng , Kun Zhang

Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities have brought great potential but also posed new risks. For example, LLMs with knowledge of bioweapons, advanced chemistry, or cyberattacks could cause violence if placed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Khoriaty , Andrii Shportko , Gustavo Mercier , Zach Wood-Doughty

Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover closed-form mathematical expressions that accurately describe data, offering interpretability and analytical insight beyond standard black-box models. Existing SR methods often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Mansooreh Montazerin , Majd Al Aawar , Antonio Ortega , Ajitesh Srivastava

Retrieval over large codebases is a key component of modern LLM-based software engineering systems. Existing approaches predominantly rely on dense embedding models, while learned sparse retrieval (LSR) remains largely unexplored for code.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Simon Lupart , Maxime Louis , Thibault Formal , Hervé Déjean , Stéphane Clinchant

A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Charles O'Neill , Alim Gumran , David Klindt

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 auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

Dense retrieval requires high-quality text sequence embeddings to support effective search in the representation space. Autoencoder-based language models are appealing in dense retrieval as they train the encoder to output high-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Shuqi Lu , Di He , Chenyan Xiong , Guolin Ke , Waleed Malik , Zhicheng Dou , Paul Bennett , Tieyan Liu , Arnold Overwijk

Understanding the multilingual mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) provides insight into how they process different languages, yet this remains challenging. Existing studies often focus on individual neurons, but their polysemantic…

Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mark Muchane , Sean Richardson , Kiho Park , Victor Veitch

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

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

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating a dense depth map from a set of sparse LiDAR points. We use techniques from compressed sensing and the recently developed Alternating Direction Neural Networks (ADNNs) to create a deep…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Nathaniel Chodosh , Chaoyang Wang , Simon Lucey

While large visual-language models (LVLM) have shown promising results on traditional visual question answering benchmarks, it is still challenging for them to answer complex VQA problems which requires diverse world knowledge. Motivated by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Dongze Hao , Qunbo Wang , Longteng Guo , Jie Jiang , Jing Liu

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been quite successful in solving many complex learning problems. However, DNNs tend to have a large number of learning parameters, leading to a large memory and computation requirement. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Sangkyun Lee , Jeonghyun Lee

Dense Retrieval (DR) reaches state-of-the-art results in first-stage retrieval, but little is known about the mechanisms that contribute to its success. Therefore, in this work, we conduct an interpretation study of recently proposed DR…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Jingtao Zhan , Jiaxin Mao , Yiqun Liu , Jiafeng Guo , Min Zhang , Shaoping Ma

Phrase-level dense retrieval has shown many appealing characteristics in downstream NLP tasks by leveraging the fine-grained information that phrases offer. In our work, we propose a new task formulation of dense retrieval, cross-lingual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Huayang Li , Deng Cai , Zhi Qu , Qu Cui , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Lemao Liu , Taro Watanabe

Sparse autoencoders are a standard tool for uncovering interpretable latent representations in neural networks. Yet, their interpretation depends on the inputs, making their isolated study incomplete. Polynomials offer a solution; they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Thomas Dooms , Ward Gauderis

Artificial Text Detection (ATD) is becoming increasingly important with the rise of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite numerous efforts, no single algorithm performs consistently well across different types of unseen text or…