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Related papers: Sparse Autoencoders, Again?

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Structured variational autoencoders (SVAEs) combine probabilistic graphical model priors on latent variables, deep neural networks to link latent variables to observed data, and structure-exploiting algorithms for approximate posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-29 Yixiu Zhao , Scott W. Linderman

The manifold hypothesis states that high-dimensional data can be modeled as lying on or near a low-dimensional, nonlinear manifold. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) approximate this manifold by learning mappings from low-dimensional latent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-03 Marissa C. Connor , Gregory H. Canal , Christopher J. Rozell

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular class of deep generative models with many variants and a wide range of applications. Improvements upon the standard VAE mostly focus on the modelling of the posterior distribution over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 James Langley , Miguel Monteiro , Charles Jones , Nick Pawlowski , Ben Glocker

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Charles O'Neill , Christine Ye , Kartheik Iyer , John F. Wu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to disentangle the dense, polysemantic internal representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable, monosemantic concepts. However, standard $\ell_1$-regularized SAEs suffer from feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Faris Chaudhry , Keisuke Yano , Anthea Monod

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful deep generative models widely used to represent high-dimensional complex data through a low-dimensional latent space learned in an unsupervised manner. In the original VAE model, the input data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Laurent Girin , Simon Leglaive , Xiaoyu Bie , Julien Diard , Thomas Hueber , Xavier Alameda-Pineda

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Kenny Peng , Rajiv Movva , Jon Kleinberg , Emma Pierson , Nikhil Garg

Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a technique for sparse decomposition of neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, current SAEs suffer from feature absorption, where specialized features capture instances of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Elena Tutubalina , Ivan Oseledets

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Harry Mayne , Yushi Yang , Adam Mahdi

Learning rich data representations from unlabeled data is a key challenge towards applying deep learning algorithms in downstream tasks. Several variants of variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been proposed to learn compact data…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Pan Xiao , Peijie Qiu , Sungmin Ha , Abdalla Bani , Shuang Zhou , Aristeidis Sotiras

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for extracting human-interpretable features from neural networks activations. Previous works compared different models based on SAE-derived features but those comparisons have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Clément Cornet , Romaric Besançon , Hervé Le Borgne

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful deep generative model that is now extensively used to represent high-dimensional complex data via a low-dimensional latent space learned in an unsupervised manner. In the original VAE model,…

Sound · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Xiaoyu Bie , Laurent Girin , Simon Leglaive , Thomas Hueber , Xavier Alameda-Pineda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for interpreting and steering the internal representations of large language models (LLMs). However, conventional approaches to analyzing SAEs typically rely solely on…

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie

The ImageNet hierarchy provides a structured taxonomy of object categories, offering a valuable lens through which to analyze the representations learned by deep vision models. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of how vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Density estimation, compression and data generation are crucial tasks in artificial intelligence. Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) constitute a single framework to achieve these goals. Here, we present a novel class of generative models,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-07 Ioannis Gatopoulos , Jakub M. Tomczak

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