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Related papers: Sparse Autoencoders, Again?

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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ege Erdogan , Ana Lucic

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jack Gallifant , Shan Chen , Kuleen Sasse , Hugo Aerts , Thomas Hartvigsen , Danielle S. Bitterman

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network's internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jeffrey Olmo , Jared Wilson , Max Forsey , Bryce Hepner , Thomas Vin Howe , David Wingate

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are well-established as a principled approach to probabilistic unsupervised learning with neural networks. Typically, an encoder network defines the parameters of a Gaussian distributed latent space from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Alan Jeffares , Liyuan Liu

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for interpreting neural networks by decomposing their activations into sparse sets of human-interpretable features. Recent work has introduced multiple SAE variants and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

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

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 been applied to large language models and protein language models, but not systematically to electronic health record (EHR) foundation models. We train TopK SAEs on FlatASCEND, a 14.5-million-parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Chris Sainsbury , Feng Dong , Andreas Karwath

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

Understanding the latent spaces learned by deep learning models is crucial in exploring how they represent and generate complex data. Autoencoders (AEs) have played a key role in the area of representation learning, with numerous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Anika Shrivastava , Renu Rameshan , Samar Agnihotri

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

The key idea of variational auto-encoders (VAEs) resembles that of traditional auto-encoder models in which spatial information is supposed to be explicitly encoded in the latent space. However, the latent variables in VAEs are vectors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Zhengyang Wang , Hao Yuan , Shuiwang Ji

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been used extensively to discover low-dimensional latent factors governing neural activity and animal behavior. However, without careful model selection, the uncovered latent factors may reflect noise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Julia Huiming Wang , Dexter Tsin , Tatiana Engel

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque. Recently, mechanistic interpretability has attracted significant attention from the research community as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dong Shu , Xuansheng Wu , Haiyan Zhao , Daking Rai , Ziyu Yao , Ninghao Liu , Mengnan Du

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, their generalization is inconsistent: while these models can perform impressively in some settings, fine-tuned…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Aiden Swann , Lachlain McGranahan , Hugo Buurmeijer , Monroe Kennedy , Mac Schwager

Adapting foundation models for specific purposes has become a standard approach to build machine learning systems for downstream applications. Yet, it is an open question which mechanisms take place during adaptation. Here we develop a new…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Hyesu Lim , Jinho Choi , Jaegul Choo , Steffen Schneider

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that SAEs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

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