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Sparse document representations have been widely used to retrieve relevant documents via exact lexical matching. Owing to the pre-computed inverted index, it supports fast ad-hoc search but incurs the vocabulary mismatch problem. Although…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Eunseong Choi , Sunkyung Lee , Minjin Choi , Hyeseon Ko , Young-In Song , Jongwuk Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Liv Gorton

In this paper, we develop a new framework for sensing and recovering structured signals. In contrast to compressive sensing (CS) systems that employ linear measurements, sparse representations, and computationally complex convex/greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-01 Ali Mousavi , Ankit B. Patel , Richard G. Baraniuk

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

This paper introduces an elemental building block which combines Dictionary Learning and Dimension Reduction (DRDL). We show how this foundational element can be used to iteratively construct a Hierarchical Sparse Representation (HSR) of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-06-03 Mohamad Tarifi , Meera Sitharam , Jeffery Ho

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mateusz Pach , Shyamgopal Karthik , Quentin Bouniot , Serge Belongie , Zeynep Akata

Is there really much more to say about sparse autoencoders (SAEs)? Autoencoders in general, and SAEs in particular, represent deep architectures that are capable of modeling low-dimensional latent structure in data. Such structure could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Yin Lu , Xuening Zhu , Tong He , David Wipf

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) offer a natural path toward comparable explanations across different representation spaces. However, current SAEs are trained per modality, producing dictionaries whose features are not directly understandable and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Difei Gu , Yunhe Gao , Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zihan Dong , Guoning Zhang , Bangwei Guo , Yang Zhou , Mu Zhou , Dimitris Metaxas

Prediction without justification has limited utility. Much of the success of neural models can be attributed to their ability to learn rich, dense and expressive representations. While these representations capture the underlying complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Anant Subramanian , Danish Pruthi , Harsh Jhamtani , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Eduard Hovy

Sparse autoencoders have become a standard tool for uncovering interpretable latent representations in neural networks. Yet salient concepts often span manifolds that current linear methods cannot capture without post hoc analysis. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Thomas Dooms , Ward Gauderis , Geraint Wiggins , Jose Oramas

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

Continual learning studies how models can adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Although a broad spectrum of methods has been proposed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, the field remains predominantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Katarzyna Filus , Kamil Faber , Roberto Corizzo , Christopher Kanan

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural networks by identifying meaningful concepts from their representations. However, do SAEs truly uncover all concepts a model relies on, or are they inherently biased toward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Sai Sumedh R. Hindupur , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Thomas Fel , Demba Ba

Employing pre-trained language models (LM) to extract contextualized word representations has achieved state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. However, applying this technique to noisy transcripts generated by automatic speech…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Chao-Wei Huang , Yun-Nung Chen

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) trained on large language model activations output thousands of features that enable mapping to human-interpretable concepts. The current practice for analyzing these features primarily relies on inspecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Wilson E. Marcílio-Jr , Danilo M. Eler

Audio pretrained models are widely employed to solve various tasks in speech processing, sound event detection, or music information retrieval. However, the representations learned by these models are unclear, and their analysis mainly…

Despite the advantages of their low-resource settings, traditional sparse retrievers depend on exact matching approaches between high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representations of both the queries and the collection. As a result,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Dahlia Shehata

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to extract interpretable features from language models by enforcing a sparsity constraint. Ideally, training an SAE would yield latents that are both sparse and semantically meaningful. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Xiaoqing Sun , Alessandro Stolfo , Joshua Engels , Ben Wu , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Mrinmaya Sachan , Max Tegmark

We propose Latent Terms, a method revealing that models trained for dense retrieval, whether single- or multi-vector, learn representations that can trivially be decomposed into retrieval-ready sparse features. When trained on frozen…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Benjamin Clavié , Sean Lee , Aamir Shakir , Makoto P. Kato