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Translating the internal representations and computations of models into concepts that humans can understand is a key goal of interpretability. While recent dictionary learning methods such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Usha Bhalla , Alex Oesterling , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio P. Calmon

Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Arthur Conmy , Lewis Smith , Tom Lieberum , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Rohin Shah , Neel Nanda

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

The mechanisms behind multilingual capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been examined using neuron-based or internal-activation-based methods. However, these methods often face challenges such as superposition and layer-wise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Boyi Deng , Yu Wan , Yidan Zhang , Baosong Yang , Fuli Feng

By composing graphical models with deep learning architectures, we learn generative models with the strengths of both frameworks. The structured variational autoencoder (SVAE) inherits structure and interpretability from graphical models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Harry Bendekgey , Gabriel Hope , Erik B. Sudderth

In this work, we explore regions as a potential visual analogue of words for self-supervised image representation learning. Inspired by Masked Autoencoding (MAE), a generative pre-training baseline, we propose masked region autoencoding to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Duy-Kien Nguyen , Vaibhav Aggarwal , Yanghao Li , Martin R. Oswald , Alexander Kirillov , Cees G. M. Snoek , Xinlei Chen

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) operationalise the linear representation hypothesis: they reconstruct model activations as sparse linear combinations of interpretable dictionary atoms, on the implicit assumption that activation space is well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Eslam Zaher , Maciej Trzaskowski , Quan Nguyen , Fred Roosta

Understanding what sparse auto-encoder (SAE) features in vision transformers truly represent is usually done by inspecting the patches where a feature's activation is highest. However, self-attention mixes information across the entire…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sangyu Han , Yearim Kim , Nojun Kwak

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Tao Liang , Mingyang Wan , Guojun Ma , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised method for extracting sparse representations from language models, yet scalable training remains a significant challenge. We introduce a suite of 256 SAEs, trained on each…

Masked Autoencoder (MAE) has recently been shown to be effective in pre-training Vision Transformers (ViT) for natural image analysis. By reconstructing full images from partially masked inputs, a ViT encoder aggregates contextual…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-24 Lei Zhou , Huidong Liu , Joseph Bae , Junjun He , Dimitris Samaras , Prateek Prasanna

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

Masked autoencoding has become a successful pretraining paradigm for Transformer models for text, images, and, recently, point clouds. Raw automotive datasets are suitable candidates for self-supervised pre-training as they generally are…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Georg Hess , Johan Jaxing , Elias Svensson , David Hagerman , Christoffer Petersson , Lennart Svensson

Deep neural networks achieve impressive performance but remain difficult to interpret and control. We present SALVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Latent Vector Editing), a unified "discover, validate, and control" framework that bridges mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Vegard Flovik

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

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

This paper shows that masked autoencoders (MAE) are scalable self-supervised learners for computer vision. Our MAE approach is simple: we mask random patches of the input image and reconstruct the missing pixels. It is based on two core…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Kaiming He , Xinlei Chen , Saining Xie , Yanghao Li , Piotr Dollár , Ross Girshick

The Masked Autoencoder (MAE) has recently demonstrated effectiveness in pre-training Vision Transformers (ViT) for analyzing natural images. By reconstructing complete images from partially masked inputs, the ViT encoder gathers contextual…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-03 Badhan Kumar Das , Gengyan Zhao , Han Liu , Thomas J. Re , Dorin Comaniciu , Eli Gibson , Andreas Maier

Vision-language models learn powerful multimodal embeddings, yet their internal semantics remain opaque. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features, they rely on expanding the representation dimension, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Piotr Kubaty , Patryk Marszałek , Łukasz Struski , Adam Wróbel , Jacek Tabor , Marek Śmieja