Related papers: Dense SAE Latents Are Features, Not Bugs
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…
Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…
Predicting protein function from amino acid sequence remains a central challenge in data-scarce (low-$N$) regimes, limiting machine learning-guided protein design when only small amounts of assay-labeled sequence-function data are…
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…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…
Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits…
Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven effective for extracting monosemantic features from large language models (LLMs), yet these features are typically identified in isolation. However, broad evidence suggests that LLMs capture the…
Sparse autoencoders provide a promising unsupervised approach for extracting interpretable features from a language model by reconstructing activations from a sparse bottleneck layer. Since language models learn many concepts, autoencoders…
Sparse autoencoders are usually trained one layer at a time, even though transformer residual stream activations are strongly coupled across depth. This creates a practical problem for multi-layer interventions: different layerwise…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a predominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, aiming to identify interpretable monosemantic features. However, how does sparse encoding organize the representations of activation vector from…
SAEs have recently been employed as a promising unsupervised approach for understanding the representations of layers of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, with the growth in model size and complexity, training SAEs is computationally…
Syntactic information contains structures and rules about how text sentences are arranged. Incorporating syntax into text modeling methods can potentially benefit both representation learning and generation. Variational autoencoders (VAEs)…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…
Sparse Autoencoders for transformer-based language models are typically defined independently per layer. In this work we analyze statistical relationships between features in adjacent layers to understand how features evolve through a…
Structuring the latent space in probabilistic deep generative models, e.g., variational autoencoders (VAEs), is important to yield more expressive models and interpretable representations, and to avoid overfitting. One way to achieve this…
The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) interpret neural network representations by decomposing activations into sparse combinations of dictionary atoms. However, SAEs assume features combine additively through linear reconstruction, an assumption that…