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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for extracting human-interpretable features from neural networks activations. Previous works compared different models based on SAE-derived features but those comparisons have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Clément Cornet , Romaric Besançon , Hervé Le Borgne

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Thibault Formal , Maxime Louis , Hervé Dejean , Stéphane Clinchant

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a useful tool for interpreting the internal representations of neural networks. However, naively optimising SAEs for reconstruction loss and sparsity results in a preference for SAEs that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Kola Ayonrinde , Michael T. Pearce , Lee Sharkey

For large language models (LLMs), sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely employed for mechanistic interpretability and model steering. Within this context, steering is by design performed by means of decoding altered SAE intermediate representations. This procedure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Antonio Bărbălau , Cristian Daniel Păduraru , Teodor Poncu , Alexandru Tifrea , Elena Burceanu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ege Erdogan , Ana Lucic

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

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

A common goal of mechanistic interpretability is to decompose the activations of neural networks into features: interpretable properties of the input computed by the model. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for finding these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Patrick Leask , Bart Bussmann , Michael Pearce , Joseph Bloom , Curt Tigges , Noura Al Moubayed , Lee Sharkey , Neel Nanda

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Xuyuan Xiong , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Radiological services are experiencing unprecedented demand, leading to increased interest in automating radiology report generation. Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) suffer from hallucinations, lack interpretability, and require…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Ahmed Abdulaal , Hugo Fry , Nina Montaña-Brown , Ayodeji Ijishakin , Jack Gao , Stephanie Hyland , Daniel C. Alexander , Daniel C. Castro

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 John Yan , Michael Yu , Yuqi Sun , Alexander Duffy , Tyler Marques , Matthew Lyle Olson

Understanding the multilingual mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) provides insight into how they process different languages, yet this remains challenging. Existing studies often focus on individual neurons, but their polysemantic…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are powerful tools for interpreting neural representations, yet their use in audio remains underexplored. We train SAEs across all encoder layers of Whisper and HuBERT, provide an extensive evaluation of their…

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 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