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Related papers: Sparse Autoencoders, Again?

200 papers

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jeremy Budd , Javier Ideami , Benjamin Macdowall Rynne , Keith Duggar , Randall Balestriero

The latent space of generative modeling is long dominated by the VAE encoder. The latents from the pretrained representation encoders (e.g., DINO, SigLIP, MAE) are previously considered inappropriate for generative modeling. Recently, RAE…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Hu Yu , Hang Xu , Jie Huang , Zeyue Xue , Haoyang Huang , Nan Duan , Feng Zhao

Despite their ubiquity, variational autoencoders (VAEs) inherently suffer from posterior collapse, a failure mode in which latent variables are effectively ignored. This failure arises because explicit prior imposition drives optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Hazhir Aliahmadi , Irina Babayan , Greg van Anders

EEG foundation models achieve state-of-the-art clinical performance, yet the internal computations driving their predictions remain opaque: a barrier to clinical trust. We apply TopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) across three architecturally…

Software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and SQL injections are a major source of security breaches. Traditional methods for vulnerability detection remain essential but are limited by high false positive rates, scalability issues,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Rui Melo , Claudia Mamede , Andre Catarino , Rui Abreu , Henrique Lopes Cardoso

The linear representation hypothesis states that neural network activations encode high-level concepts as linear mixtures. However, under superposition, this encoding is a projection from a higher-dimensional concept space into a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Vitória Barin Pacela , Shruti Joshi , Isabela Camacho , Simon Lacoste-Julien , David Klindt

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a mechanistic interpretability technique that have been used to provide insight into learned concepts within large protein language models. Here, we employ TopK and Ordered SAEs to investigate autoregressive…

Vision-language models encode images and text in a joint space, minimizing the distance between corresponding image and text pairs. How are language and images organized in this joint space, and how do the models encode meaning and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Isabel Papadimitriou , Huangyuan Su , Thomas Fel , Sham Kakade , Stephanie Gil

Text-to-image diffusion models generate images through an iterative denoising process, so internal neural layers produce trajectories of activations rather than single static representations. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Calvin Yeung , Prathyush Poduval , Ali Zakeri , Zhuowen Zou , Mohsen Imani

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and its variations are classic generative models by learning a low-dimensional latent representation to satisfy some prior distribution (e.g., Gaussian distribution). Their advantages over GAN are that they can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Cong Geng , Jia Wang , Li Chen , Zhiyong Gao

Variational Autoencoders (VAE) are probabilistic deep generative models underpinned by elegant theory, stable training processes, and meaningful manifold representations. However, they produce blurry images due to a lack of explicit…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Prashnna K Gyawali , Rudra Saha , Linwei Wang , VSR Veeravasarapu , Maneesh Singh

Deep neural networks are powerful tools for biomedical image segmentation. These models are often trained with heavy supervision, relying on pairs of images and corresponding voxel-level labels. However, obtaining segmentations of…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-30 Evan M. Yu , Juan Eugenio Iglesias , Adrian V. Dalca , Mert R. Sabuncu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are one of the main methods to interpret the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs), decomposing activations into higher-dimensional features. However, they exhibit critical shortcomings where a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michał Brzozowski , Neo Christopher Chung

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

Learning latent representations that are simultaneously expressive, geometrically well-structured, and reliably calibrated remains a central challenge for Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). Standard VAEs typically assume a diagonal Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mehmet Can Yavuz

Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) are capable of learning latent representations for high dimensional data. However, due to the i.i.d. assumption, VAEs only optimize the singleton variational distributions and fail to account for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-20 Da Tang , Dawen Liang , Tony Jebara , Nicholas Ruozzi

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have become a popular approach for dimensionality reduction. However, despite their ability to identify latent low-dimensional structures embedded within high-dimensional data, these latent representations…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-27 Kaspar Märtens , Christopher Yau

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

The variational auto-encoder (VAE) is a popular method for learning a generative model and embeddings of the data. Many real datasets are hierarchically structured. However, traditional VAEs map data in a Euclidean latent space which cannot…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-27 Emile Mathieu , Charline Le Lan , Chris J. Maddison , Ryota Tomioka , Yee Whye Teh

Variational autoencdoers (VAE) are a popular approach to generative modelling. However, exploiting the capabilities of VAEs in practice can be difficult. Recent work on regularised and entropic autoencoders have begun to explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Gregory A. Daly , Jonathan E. Fieldsend , Gavin Tabor