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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) trained on large language model activations output thousands of features that enable mapping to human-interpretable concepts. The current practice for analyzing these features primarily relies on inspecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Wilson E. Marcílio-Jr , Danilo M. Eler

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Seonglae Cho , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama

This study explores how bilingual language models develop complex internal representations. We employ sparse autoencoders to analyze internal representations of bilingual language models with a focus on the effects of training steps,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Tatsuro Inaba , Go Kamoda , Kentaro Inui , Masaru Isonuma , Yusuke Miyao , Yohei Oseki , Benjamin Heinzerling , Yu Takagi

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpreting language model activations. A key evaluation metric is the increase in cross-entropy loss between the original model logits and the reconstructed model logits when replacing model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Adam Karvonen

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to optimization-based jailbreak attacks that exploit internal gradient structure. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpretability, their robustness implications remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Ahson Saiyed , Sabrina Sadiekh , Chirag Agarwal

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into sparsely activating features, but many SAE features are only interpretable at high activation strengths. To address this issue we propose to use binary sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Lucia Quirke , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

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

We investigate feature universality in Gemma-2 language models (Gemma-2-2B and Gemma-2-9B), asking whether models with a four-fold difference in scale still converge on comparable internal concepts. Using the Sparse Autoencoder (SAE)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Daniel Son , Sanjana Rathore , Andrew Rufail , Adrian Simon , Daniel Zhang , Soham Dave , Cole Blondin , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien

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

In this work, we demonstrate that affine mappings between residual streams of language models is a cheap way to effectively transfer represented features between models. We apply this technique to transfer the weights of Sparse Autoencoders…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Alan Chen , Jack Merullo , Alessandro Stolfo , Ellie Pavlick

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive, unstructured corpora, making it unclear which social patterns and biases they absorb and later reproduce. Existing evaluations typically examine outputs or activations, but rarely connect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mariam Mahran , Katharina Simbeck

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Jannik Brinkmann , Chris Wendler , Christian Bartelt , Aaron Mueller

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract features from LLM internal activations, meant to correspond to interpretable concepts. A core SAE training hyperparameter is L0: how many SAE features should fire per token on average. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Zachary Baker , Yuxiao Li

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to interpreting the internal representations of transformer language models. However, SAEs are usually trained separately on each transformer layer, making it difficult to use them to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Tim Lawson , Lucy Farnik , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) \citep{bricken2023monosemanticity,gao2024scalingevaluatingsparseautoencoders} rely on dictionary learning to extract interpretable features from neural networks at scale in an unsupervised manner, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Hans Peter , Anders Søgaard

Model internals encode rich information about how a large language model (LLM) processes its training data; however, post-training data engineering largely relies on external signals and ignores rich intrinsic signals lying in model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yi Jing , Zao Dai , Jinwu Hu , Zijun Yao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li , Xiaozhi Wang