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The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zirui He , Haiyan Zhao , Yiran Qiao , Fan Yang , Ali Payani , Jing Ma , Mengnan Du

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yi Fang , Wenjie Wang , Mingfeng Xue , Boyi Deng , Fengli Xu , Dayiheng Liu , Fuli Feng

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) capture structured meaning requires examining how they represent concept relationships. In this work, we study three models of increasing scale: Pythia-70M, GPT-2, and Llama 3.1 8B,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Andor Diera , Ansgar Scherp

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jiaojiao Han , Wujiang Xu , Mingyu Jin , Mengnan Du

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Panagiotis Koromilas , Andreas D. Demou , James Oldfield , Yannis Panagakis , Mihalis Nicolaou

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a standard tool for mechanistic interpretability in autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling researchers to extract sparse, human-interpretable features and intervene on model behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Xu Wang , Bingqing Jiang , Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Lingpeng Kong , Difan Zou

One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is \textit{polysemanticity}, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Hoagy Cunningham , Aidan Ewart , Logan Riggs , Robert Huben , Lee Sharkey

A central goal for mechanistic interpretability has been to identify the right units of analysis in large language models (LLMs) that causally explain their outputs. While early work focused on individual neurons, evidence that neurons…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Or Shafran , Atticus Geiger , Mor Geva

Despite strong performance in audio perception tasks, large audio-language models (AudioLLMs) remain opaque to interpretation. A major factor behind this lack of interpretability is that individual neurons in these models frequently…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Townim Faisal Chowdhury , Ta Duc Huy , Siqi Pan , Jeremy Stoddard , Zhibin Liao

Artificial Text Detection (ATD) is becoming increasingly important with the rise of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite numerous efforts, no single algorithm performs consistently well across different types of unseen text or…

Connecting LLMs with formal knowledge representation and reasoning is a promising approach to address their shortcomings. Embeddings and sparse autoencoders are widely used to represent textual content, but the semantics are entangled with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Cliff O'Reilly , Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz , Tillman Weyde

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the features learned by large language models (LLMs). By reconstructing features with sparsely activated networks, SAEs aim to recover complex superposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jingyi Cui , Qi Zhang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as pivotal tools for introspection into large language models. SAEs can uncover high-quality, interpretable features at different levels of granularity and enable targeted steering of the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Martin Spišák , Ladislav Peška , Petr Škoda , Vojtěch Vančura , Rodrigo Alves

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xudong Zhu , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili , Zhihui Zhu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract millions of interpretable features from a language model, but flat feature inventories aren't very useful on their own. Domain concepts get mixed with generic and weakly grounded features, while related…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 John Winnicki , Abeynaya Gnanasekaran , Eric Darve

Protein language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in protein modeling and design, yet their internal mechanisms for predicting structure and function remain poorly understood. Here we present a systematic approach to…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-18 Elana Simon , James Zou

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool for analyzing and interpreting the activation space of transformer-based language models (LMs). However, SAEs suffer several shortcomings that diminish their utility and internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

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…