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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to probe Large Language Models (LLMs) and extract interpretable concepts from their internal representations. These concepts are linear combinations of neuron activations that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Mathis Le Bail , Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Sonia Vanier

In this thesis, we develop methods to enhance the interpretability of recent representation learning techniques in natural language processing (NLP) while accounting for the unavailability of annotated data. We choose to leverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Ghazi Felhi

As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jiaming Li , Haoran Ye , Yukun Chen , Xinyue Li , Lei Zhang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Jimmy Chih-Hsien Peng , Min Yang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool in mechanistic interpretability, helping to analyze internal representations in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). By decomposing polysemantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jakub Stępień , Marcin Mazur , Jacek Tabor , Przemysław Spurek

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

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

Recent work on sparse autoencoders (SAEs) has shown promise in extracting interpretable features from neural networks and addressing challenges with polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. In this paper, we apply SAEs to the early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Liv Gorton

Scientific archives now contain hundreds of petabytes of data across genomics, ecology, climate, and molecular biology that could reveal undiscovered patterns if systematically analyzed at scale. Large-scale, weakly-supervised datasets in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Jacob Beattie , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to interpret foundation models, but their role as an actionable intervention space remains less understood, especially in vision. We study whether sparse visual features can be used not only…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zhuowei Li , Gemma E. Moran , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features represented in frontier models, it will be necessary to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Anish Mudide , Joshua Engels , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Christian Schroeder de Witt

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

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have become a prevalent tool for interpreting language models' inner workings. However, it is unknown how tightly SAE features correspond to computationally important directions in the model. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Thomas Dooms , Daniel Wilhelm

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

Interpretability can improve the safety, transparency and trust of AI models, which is especially important in healthcare applications where decisions often carry significant consequences. Mechanistic interpretability, particularly through…

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

Transformers generate valid and diverse chemical structures, but little is known about the mechanisms that enable these models to capture the rules of molecular representation. We present a mechanistic analysis of autoregressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Kristof Varadi , Mark Marosi , Peter Antal

Recent work shows that Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) applied to large language model (LLM) layers have neurons corresponding to interpretable concepts. These SAE neurons can be modified to align generated outputs, but only towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ananya Joshi , Celia Cintas , Skyler Speakman

Transformer-based models generate hidden states that are difficult to interpret. In this work, we analyze hidden states and modify them at inference, with a focus on motion forecasting. We use linear probing to analyze whether interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Omer Sahin Tas , Royden Wagner

Speech holds promise as a cost-effective and non-invasive biomarker for neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD). While deep learning systems trained on raw audio can find subtle signals not available from hand-crafted…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-24 Peter Plantinga , Jen-Kai Chen , Roozbeh Sattari , Mirco Ravanelli , Denise Klein

We introduce sparse autoencoder neural operators (SAE-NOs), a new class of sparse autoencoders that operate in function spaces rather than fixed-dimensional Euclidean representations. We formalize the functional representation hypothesis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bahareh Tolooshams , Ailsa Shen , Anima Anandkumar