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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

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

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Abhinav Menon , Manish Shrivastava , David Krueger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

Recent interpretability work on large language models (LLMs) has been increasingly dominated by a feature-discovery approach with the help of proxy modules. Then, the quality of features learned by, e.g., sparse auto-encoders (SAEs), is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mengyu Ye , Jun Suzuki , Tatsuro Inaba , Tatsuki Kuribayashi

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) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a powerful dictionary learning technique for decomposing neural network activations, translating the hidden state into human ideas with high semantic value despite no external intervention or guidance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Albert Miao , Chenliang Zhou , Jiawei Zhou , Cengiz Oztireli

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

Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Philipp Wesp , Robbie Holland , Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa , Sergios Gatidis

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

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

The fidelity with which neural networks can now generate content such as music presents a scientific opportunity: these systems appear to have learned implicit theories of such content's structure through statistical learning alone. This…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Nikhil Singh , Manuel Cherep , Pattie Maes

Modern LLMs face inference efficiency challenges due to their scale. To address this, many compression methods have been proposed, such as pruning and quantization. However, the effect of compression on a model's interpretability remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Suchit Gupte , Vishnu Kabir Chhabra , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

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

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

Finding an interpretable non-redundant representation of real-world data is one of the key problems in Machine Learning. Biological neural networks are known to solve this problem quite well in unsupervised manner, yet unsupervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Denis Kuzminykh , Laida Kushnareva , Timofey Grigoryev , Alexander Zatolokin

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting large language models (LLMs) by decomposing token activations into combinations of human-understandable features. While SAEs provide crucial insights into LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhen Xu , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Kaidi Xu , Tianlong Chen

Diffusion models have become the go-to method for text-to-image generation, producing high-quality images from pure noise. However, the inner workings of diffusion models is still largely a mystery due to their black-box nature and complex,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Berk Tinaz , Zalan Fabian , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

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…