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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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo and Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Seonglae Cho , Harryn Oh , Donghyun Lee , Luis Eduardo Rodrigues Vieira , Andrew Bermingham , Ziad El Sayed

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

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Jacob S. Prince , Matthew Kowal , Victor Boutin , Isabel Papadimitriou , Binxu Wang , Martin Wattenberg , Demba Ba , Talia Konkle

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

Understanding and mitigating the potential risks associated with foundation models (FMs) hinges on developing effective interpretability methods. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for disentangling FM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Aashiq Muhamed , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

Unlearning specific concepts in text-to-image diffusion models has become increasingly important for preventing undesirable content generation. Among prior approaches, sparse autoencoder (SAE)-based methods have attracted attention due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hyeonjin Kim , Hangyeol Jung , Heechan Yun , Sungjun Yun , Dong-Jun Han

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become central tools for interpretability, leveraging dictionary learning principles to extract sparse, interpretable features from neural representations whose underlying structure is typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

Continual learning studies how models can adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Although a broad spectrum of methods has been proposed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, the field remains predominantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Katarzyna Filus , Kamil Faber , Roberto Corizzo , Christopher Kanan

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

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

Despite the remarkable progress in text-to-image generative models, they are prone to adversarial attacks and inadvertently generate unsafe, unethical content. Existing approaches often rely on fine-tuning models to remove specific…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Dahye Kim , Deepti Ghadiyaram

The rapid development of generative AI has transformed content creation, communication, and human development. However, this technology raises profound concerns in high-stakes domains, demanding rigorous methods to analyze and evaluate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Yiming Tang , Arash Lagzian , Srinivas Anumasa , Qiran Zou , Yingtao Zhu , Ye Zhang , Trang Nguyen , Yih-Chung Tham , Ehsan Adeli , Ching-Yu Cheng , Yilun Du , Dianbo Liu

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

The ImageNet hierarchy provides a structured taxonomy of object categories, offering a valuable lens through which to analyze the representations learned by deep vision models. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of how vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

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