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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mark Muchane , Sean Richardson , Kiho Park , Victor Veitch

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to interpret foundation models, but their role as an actionable intervention space remains less understood, especially in vision. We study whether sparse visual features can be used not only…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zhuowei Li , Gemma E. Moran , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring how interpretable they are remains challenging, with weak consensus about which benchmarks to use. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for learning interpretable features from neural network activations. However, the optimization landscape for SAE training can be challenging due to correlations in the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ashwin Saraswatula , David Klindt

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable interpretability research by decomposing entangled model activations into monosemantic features. However, under what circumstances SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety, a low-frequency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jiaqi Weng , Han Zheng , Hanyu Zhang , Ej Zhou , Qinqin He , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Zhixuan Chu , Xiting Wang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) operationalise the linear representation hypothesis: they reconstruct model activations as sparse linear combinations of interpretable dictionary atoms, on the implicit assumption that activation space is well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Eslam Zaher , Maciej Trzaskowski , Quan Nguyen , Fred Roosta

Stack autoencoder (SAE), as a representative deep network, has unique and excellent performance in feature learning, and has received extensive attention from researchers. However, existing deep SAEs focus on original samples without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Chuanyan Zhou , Jie Ma , Fan Li , Yongming Li , Pin Wang , Xiaoheng Zhang

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…

We describe HypotheSAEs, a general method to hypothesize interpretable relationships between text data (e.g., headlines) and a target variable (e.g., clicks). HypotheSAEs has three steps: (1) train a sparse autoencoder on text embeddings to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Rajiv Movva , Kenny Peng , Nikhil Garg , Jon Kleinberg , Emma Pierson

Understanding how features evolve across layers in deep neural networks is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability, particularly due to polysemanticity and feature superposition. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Nikita Balagansky , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a natural path toward comparable explanations across different representation spaces. However, current SAEs are trained per modality, producing dictionaries whose features are not directly understandable and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Difei Gu , Yunhe Gao , Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zihan Dong , Guoning Zhang , Bangwei Guo , Yang Zhou , Mu Zhou , Dimitris Metaxas

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

Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Arthur Conmy , Lewis Smith , Tom Lieberum , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Rohin Shah , Neel Nanda

Artistic style transfer in generative models remains a significant challenge, as existing methods often introduce style only via model fine-tuning, additional adapters, or prompt engineering, all of which can be computationally expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Raina Panda , Daniel Fein , Arpita Singhal , Mark Fiore , Maneesh Agrawala , Matyas Bohacek