Related papers: TopK Language Models
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural networks by identifying meaningful concepts from their representations. However, do SAEs truly uncover all concepts a model relies on, or are they inherently biased toward…
We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…
We study the challenge of achieving theoretically grounded feature recovery using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) for the interpretation of Large Language Models. Existing SAE training algorithms often lack rigorous mathematical guarantees and…
Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…
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…
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.…
Understanding the internal machinations of deep Transformer-based NLP models is more crucial than ever as these models see widespread use in various domains that affect the public at large, such as industry, academia, finance, health. While…
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…
Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…
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…
Large language models have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to inspect, control, and systematically improve them. This opacity…
Recent LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance by integrating deep thinking and complex reasoning during generation. However, the internal mechanisms behind these reasoning processes remain unexplored. We…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained in complex Reinforcement Learning, multi-agent environments, making it difficult to understand how behavior changes over training. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently shown to be…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to steer large language models (LLMs), based on the assumption that their interpretable features naturally enable effective model behavior steering. Yet, a fundamental question remains unanswered:…
We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to decompose neural networks into interpretable features and map their connecting circuits. The standard approach trains sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on each layer's activations. However, SAEs trained in…